Black Widow: The Agent of Necessary Evil
by The Alpha Gray Wolf
Summary: Five years ago, the world was saved from a global threat but it's time for round two. Natasha Romanoff, who failed to become a Black Widow agent, has only her twin brother to trust as she discovers a secret plot within the Red Room that could threaten the lives of millions of people. Set in an alternate universe on Earth-192322, acts as a parallel universe to the Black Widow movie.
1. B

**Disclaimer: I only own the stuff that I made up. The rest belongs to Marvel, song artists, etc.**

**Starring: Scarlet Johansson as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow and Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova**

**Extended Summary**

**Five years ago, the world was saved from a global threat but it's time for round two. Natasha Romanoff, who failed to become a Black Widow agent, has only her twin brother to trust as she discovers a conspiracy in the Red Room that could threaten the lives of millions of people. Set in an alternate universe on Earth-192322, acts as a parallel universe to the actual Black Widow movie. **

* * *

_The Red Room - Fifteen Years Ago - 2001_

_Natasha Romanoff, eighteen years old, wrapped gauze around her hands and makes a tight fist with both hands. Once she is satisfied with the feeling, she looks up at her opponent with a death glare. She stands ten feet away from Melina Vostokoff before they both get into a fighting stance. Melina made the first attack, throwing multiple kicks at Nat and missing her. Nat moves her foot away from being swept and backflips with her foot connecting to Melina in the face and knocking her to the ground._

"_Excellent work," Tony called from the crowd of other Red Room agents that were watching them with no facial expressions on. "Good job, big sister."_

_Tony Masters stepped up to the fighting floor and went off against Leo Fitz. He lets Fitz attack him so he could 'photographically duplicate' his fighting style. Tony grabbed Fitz's punching hand and wraps his neck in a headlock with his legs and takes him to the ground._

_Yelena Belova cracked the bones in the knuckles as she went up against Jemma Simmons. She catches Simmons's throwing hand, kicks her to one knee and knees her in the face in less than three seconds._

_Nat's stood up to the fighting mat and gazed upon her opponent, Yelena, as she jumped up and off the ground in adrenaline. Nat loosens the knots in her shoulders before taking a fighting stance. Yelena strikes first. She uses her right leg to throw a kick at Natasha's face from the right, but Nat ducked. Without missing a beat, Yelena brought that same foot up to kick her in the face._

_**(Like Dutch did to Daniel in The Karate Kid.)**_

_A single drop of blood dripped down from Natasha's lip as she supported herself by putting her hands on her knees and bent forward. She licked her bottom lip and tasted blood before she stood up and wiped it away. "You're going to pay for that," she vowed to her opponent in a slight Russian accent as she raised her fists._

"_We'll see about that," Yelena's Russian accent countered back to her. She attacks Nat once more, catching her off guard but she was able to outmaneuver her using a combination of Judo and Jujitsu moves but she copycatted her moves and subdued her beneath her foot and hammered not her collarbone with all her might. "I told you we'll see about that." She laughed as she lifted his foot and helped Natasha get back up, only for her to punch her hard in the face and she fell flat on his back but kips up a split second later. "That was rude."_

_The crowd that swarmed them was filled with cold and emotionless facial expressions. No cheering, no flinching._

"_Romanoff, Belova, call it off," a new voice spoke as the sounds of doors opening filled the room. "Fall in formation, Red Room." The elderly woman in charge, codenamed 'Madame B.', walked into the fighting room, studying the two Red Room agents as they fell back into the formation that the still emotionless crowd formed._

_Natasha Romanoff, Tony Masters, Yelena Belova, Melina Vostokoff, Leo Fitz, and Jemma Simmons were being stalked by Madame B. with intensity, like a lion at a buffet table. She stopped at Nat and Tony's side to talk to them._

_Nat's heart pounded with nervosity until she heard Madame B. says, "Your fighting skills are impressive, you still need work but not bad for recruits."_

_Nat looked at Tony Masters in the corner of her eye. Although he was wearing a mask that resembled the Grim Reaper's skeleton face, she could tell that he was smiling under his mask just by that slight nod she gave. It wasn't exactly fair that Tony was being praised since he had something of a superpower that enabled him to duplicate his enemy's movements. Photographic reflexes, as it was called, gave him a free pass to learn any ACTUAL training. "Romanoff, Masters, walk with me."_

_Natasha and Tony looked at each other with a shrug before walking with Madame B. as they left the room. Yelena and another agent named Grant Ward took positions on the mat to spar with one another. As Natasha and Tony followed Madame B., they passed through a long hallway accompanied by two people in white lab coats that scientists usually wear on either side. Madame B. took them through a private sector of the Red Room Academy that neither recruit had seen._

_Natasha ran a hand through her wavy red hair as the scientist beside her began asking her questions._

"_I'm not in trouble, am I?" she asked Madame B. with half sarcasm. She was chuckling but she barely regarded her._

"_Are you aware of the Black Widow Program, Romanoff?" Madame B. suddenly asked._

"_Yes," she answered for both herself and Tony. "A super spy/assassin program. What about it?"_

"_The Black Widow Program is for handpicked recruits from the Red Room only." So that was the obvious answer. "How long have you been a recruit, Romanoff?"_

"_This will be my sixth-month training as a recruit."_

"_But I can see that you've trained even before you were recruited in, correct?"_

"_Ever since I was four."_

"_What about your younger brother?"_

_Natasha turns to her younger brother, Tony Masters, and decides to let him answer._

"_My photographic reflexes give me the advantage of learning quickly, ma'am. And to clarify, she is only older than me by one hundred and ninety-five seconds."_

"_Ages are irrelevant, Masters. I saw what you did during the sparring session. You copied Belova's skills to perfection."_

"_Photographic reflexes, something I was born with. Strangely, Nat wasn't." He looks at his sister and clicks his tongue with a wink, nod, and smirk. "She is still proficient as a fighter."_

"_Who usually is the victor when you and your sister fight?"_

"_It varies who the victor is, ma'am."_

"_You're both on an equal level, nevertheless, Masters."_

"_Yes, ma'am."_

"_But is there an explanation as to why you never take off your mask? I have at least two dozen students training to become the world's most elite assassins and I have yet to see your real face."_

"_Personal."_

_Madame B. took the two to a room, using a keycard to swipe the electronic lock. They enter a laboratory with several scientists inside working with various materials. Neither Natasha nor Tony had seen the inside of this locked room before and to them, it looks like something right out of a typical cliche horror movie with scientists. But what stood out most were two chairs in the middle of the room. Both of them were laughing at the thought of them being subjected to an experiment but those thoughts quickly vanished when the heads of the scientist turned to face the two siblings like they were guinea pigs for an experiment._

"_What's going on, sir?" Natasha asked upon feeling the heat from all the eyes on her. Madame B. took them to the two dentist chairs in the middle and gestured to them._

"_State your reasons for the Red Room Academy. Why did you two enlist?"_

_Black Widow said, "To become a Black Widow, ma'am."_

_Then Tony, "To do whatever is told of me, ma'am."_

_Madame B. didn't even bat an eye as she gave a new command to the scientist. The scientists on either side of Natasha and Tony stabbed the two siblings in the neck with an M99 serum before they could even react and they strapped them down into the dentists' chairs._

_The doctors woke up the two up with smelling salts snapped under their noses. The two siblings both resisted at first, trying to break out of their bonds but they were held down efficiently._

_"What's going on, Madame B.?"_

_"You want to be a Black Widow? Here's your chance." A scientist handed Madame B. a petri dish labeled 'Exspiravit'. She uses a gloved hand to pull out a tube worm that looked big enough to make someone gag. "In the Red Room, you are going to learn pain. Don't fight it." Madame B. shoved the worm known as Exspiravit down Nat's throat. "This parasite will grant you the powers that you so desperately desire as a Black Widow agent. If you're compatible, you've earned the title."_

_Nat almost threw up and gagged after feeling the worm shove down her throat like a pill that was difficult to swallow. She coughs and feels her body go numb. Once her breathing returned to normal, her eyes widen. She upchucks the parasite out of her mouth and onto her stomach, almost tearing the flesh in her neck._

_Madame B. collects the worm and puts it back in the petri dish. She shook her head disappointingly. "You failed, Natasha Romanoff."_

* * *

_The Caucasus Mountains - Five Years Ago - 2011_

_Natasha Romanoff, twenty-eight years old, stirs in her sleep as her eyes force themselves open. When she wakes, she realizes that her body is freezing and her breath was visible with every sigh. Her back suddenly became cold and she lifted her back off the snowy ground she was laying flat against._

"_Bad dream?" Tony, in his Simon 'Ghost' Riley mask from Modern Warfare 2 with sunglasses on, asked as she looked up him sitting next to her. Tony Masters was dressed in all white save for his Ghost mask with sunglasses on. He wore a white snow jacket, jeans, boots, gloves, and even colored his two pistols in his utility belt white._

"_Nightmare," she sat up and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. She looks down and realizes that she is sitting in the snow. She was dressed in a white catsuit that matched the snow-white color of the snow. She wore white snow boots and gloves. She takes out a white ski mask and puts it over her face. She is wearing a large sweater that gave off a white camouflage motif. She grabs a handful of snow and lets it slip through her gloved fingers. "How long was I out?"_

"_Three hours," Tony said simply after looking at his watch, "You look cute when you sleep, like a baby."_

_"That's kinda creepy," Nat repulsed, "We're twins."_

_"Half-twins. You know, cause our father is a man-whore." He double-checked his watch. "Break's over, sissy. Let's get going."_

_Tony grabs her and helps her to her feet and the two of them walked forward. They were on a cliff of a snowy mountain in the Caucasus and they used their icepicks to climb up the icy wall and when they got to the top, they had to climb one more and then another after that until they reached the top of the mountain where they were finally able to catch their breaths. The white clothing they wore concealed them in the snow and their sidearms, Beretta 92FS's were suppressed but both siblings preferred hand-to-hand combat when it came to taking out their enemies._

_"There's no task we can't complete," Tony whispered to his sister._

_"That's why everyone in the Red Room calls you 'The Taskmaster'."_

_"I hate that name."_

"_Tony, check you datapad," Nat orders. He obeys and gazes down at the datapad clamped down on his left wrist. He clicks a button which does a scan of over five thousand square feet. "The two white dots on the map are us and anyone whose DNA does not match that of a Red Room agent will show up as a red dot."_

"_Sounds simple enough," Tony shrugs nonchalantly. "Like in the third level of Modern Warfare 2."_

_"Let's get back on mission, shall we?"_

_The two of them then started moving forward while keeping their bodies pressed to the snow as much as possible. As they walked forward, the snow made crunches with every step._

_The mission for these two siblings was simple: Infiltrate a Russian nuclear launch site and put in the abort codes to prevent a set of ICBMs from reaching North America. They had inside intel from Yelena Belova that the nukes were set to launch in a matter of two hours and it already took them five hours to find the base and they wasted three hours sleeping near the base. From what they gathered about the nuclear launch site was that it was filled with hundreds of ex-Soviet army soldiers who were hellbent on reviving the Soviet Union fell apart fifteen years ago and the nuke being launched would cause a massive catastrophe to the United States._

_Nat and Tony climbed over the barb-wire fence with the radiation warning sign and they kept their heads down as the snowstorm started brewing up and creating a blizzard that gave them concealment. Even with extra clothing on, the two siblings shivered in their snow boots._

"_Look up ahead, one o'clock," Nat points in front of them once she spotted something. "Two guards with their backs turned to us."_

_Tony spotted two soldiers in snow uniforms smoking cigars in front of a couple of frozen oil drums with their backs turned to them. "How ignorant of these two. It would be a tragedy if something bad were to happen," he says dryly and sarcastically._

_Nat cracks the bones in her knuckles before she offers a challenge to her brother, "I bet I can take out both of the two guards in less than five seconds without them even getting a chance to even raise their guns to their shoulder level."_

_Tony smiled, loving a challenge that his sister was giving herself but even when he wasn't involved, he always wanted something out of it. "What would happen if you fail?"_

"_If I fail, then you get to rub it in my face and I will do whatever three dares you to want me to do." While still crouched down, she slowly moves towards the two soldiers, trying to be as quiet as possible and not make as many crunches in the snow as possible. She watches where she steps at the same time and barely managed to pull her foot away before it was able to crush a frozen twig like an ice cube. She closes in the two between them. She stands straight up and calls to them. "Hey boys…"_

_The two soldiers turned around, the thought of raising their guns to a potential threat not even crossing their minds and when they do, Natasha Romanoff attacks them. She took out the soldier on the right first before taking out the remaining one using a combination of strikes to the face and throat and disarming them of their weapons. They both fell flat on the ground and Nat stood above. "I win."_

"_Don't get too cocky," Tony reminds as he reunites with her. He shows her the timer on his wristwatch. "Six seconds and one millisecond; you lost."_

"_Shit," Nat curses her favorite word._

"_Don't worry," he reassured her with a pat on her back, "I'll spare those three dares until I feel like you're ready."_

_The two continued to use the cover of the storm to enter the base. They split into two directions to reach the headquarters located in the center of the launch site, the two having a competition to see who can reach their destination first._

_Nat sneaks up on a guard behind a shipping container and she knocks him out with one roundhouse kick to the jaw._

_Tony stalks a jeep with a driver and passenger inside. He punches the driver out cold when he steps out before jumping onto the passenger and smashing his head into the ground until he suffered from a loss of consciousness._

_Nat closed in at a guard walking with two others. She took out the ones on each end of the soldier in the middle before punching his lights out._

_Tony jumped over a railing and kicked a soldier in the jaw before forcefully yanking his gun away and throwing him over a wooden box._

_Nat grabs a soldier from behind and puts him to sleep in a chokehold._

_Tony tripped a tall soldier by the feet and when they're both on the ground, he wraps the inside of his knee around the soldier's throat and chokes him unconscious._

_Nat hammers two soldiers heads together._

_Tony leaps and elbows a soldier hard in the scalp._

_Nat was almost compromised but she was able to turn the tables on the soldier behind her by doing a backflip with the hell of her boot connecting to his head._

_Tony charged into a soldier coming out of a building and slammed him against the wall before shoving him to the ground and disables him with one punch._

_Both intercepted at the same door in the center of the base._

"_Nat," Tony called out with a laugh as he reunited with his sister, "I took out six guys."_

"_Really?" she challenged her brother with a voice that subtly implied she was up for a challenge, "I took out eight and I got here three milliseconds before." She smiled slyly before she moved alongside across the wall and as she moved, she paused when she realized that there was a silo covering in front of her hidden in the snow. She holds up a hand and gestured for Tony to look. "Silo covering, we're at the right base."_

"_Yeah yeah yeah and we have two hours left before the nukes launch. Get us there."_

_Nat nodded at her brother's statement before moving over to the door, crouching down to one knee and using a paperclip to pick the lock. Once the lock was unlocked, she pushed open the door by the doorknob._

_Just as the door halfway open, the doorknob was yanked away from her hand as the door was forcefully pulled open from the inside and Nat lost her balance and had no time to react before a heavy metal object went flying into her face and the lights went out._

_She woke up later with her hands zip-tied behind her back in a wooden chair. She squeezes her eyes shut to adjust to the sudden brightness in the room when her eyes slowly peel open, she sees her brother in a similar situation in a chair across from her. She heard him groaning in grogginess as he forces his eyes open and gazes upon her._

"_Hey there, brother," she says nonchalantly. "What did you dream about?"_

_He shrugged nonchalantly before saying, "I was in Tahiti and I gotta say, it was a magical place. How about you?"_

_She shrugs, "Could've been better. I dreamt that I was handcuffed in a chair but it turns out, it's not a dream and I'm not even handcuffed, I'm zip-tied."_

"_And now comes the part of the interrogation where we are supposed to be interrogated so…" He drifts off his sentence as he realizes that there are two soldiers standing guard in the only room._

_Nat scanned her environment. There was one lightbulb above them, two guards standing to their left and guarding the only door in the room and both were armed with assault rifles. She was ten feet away from her brother and realized they were both zip-tied to a wooden chair. She non-verbally details this information by having Tony's eyes follow her eyes across the room. As the two guards stared blankly at the two, more specifically at Nat, she turns back to Tony and nods._

_Nat turns to face the two guards and smiles seductively at them, but they remained motionless and still as statues. She smirked at the two and seduced the two by spreading her legs for them. They remained motionless but one of them moved over to her and she prepared to kick at him, but he did the unexpected and smashes the butt of his assault rifle into her jaw and forced a few splatters of blood to spit out of her mouth._

_That didn't work._

_The guard went back to stand with his partner but Tony kicked the guard in the groin and caused him to fold over. Nat used both of her feet to kick the guard in his back and he went flying forward. The second guard raised his rifle but Tony had already broken the zip-ties around his wrists and kicks the wooden chair at the second guard and it smashes into pieces. He already charges at the guard and snatches the gun away before he unleashes several martial arts moves he copied from the Mission: Impossible movies and disabled the guard in unconsciousness._

_Nat breaks out of her zip-ties and tackles the guard she kicked down to the ground and punches his lights out in less than ten seconds with a dozen and a half punches from either side._

"_Goodnight." She climbs to her feet and takes the assault rifle and checks it for a fully loaded magazine before slapping it back into place. "Tony," she called her brother, "They knew we were coming."_

"_They just got lucky," he scoffs arrogantly as he picks up the guard's pistol._

"_No, they were able to knock out both of us before we even saw their punches coming. That means that they knew we were coming, they knew that we specifically were coming."_

"_Or…" Tony shrugs as he pulls back the chamber of the pistol, "They just got lucky. You sound like you're trying to sniff out a traitor."_

_She wasn't even thinking about a traitor but since he mentioned the title 'traitor'..._

"_I'll trade you," she says after she spots the Beretta 92FS in Tony's hand. "I know how much you favor machine guns over pistols. Sound fair?" She holds out the AK-47 for him to accept, which he does._

_The two then break through the door and open fire on all of the enemy soldiers inside. Nat emptied all the bullets in her magazine before she picked one off of an enemy soldier and slapped the mag inside. That's when she felt a pair of hands ambush her from behind and grab her. Another soldier grabs her by the legs but she shoots him in the head, slips out of the first soldier's grasp and shoots him up the jaw. Three more soldiers gang up on her. She knocks one back into the other, punching the last one with the butt of the gun over the head before shooting him in the heart. She grabs the two other soldiers and smashes their heads together like cymbals before shooting both of them. Tony was doing the same thing and once all the soldiers in the room were eliminated, they finally stopped to see that they were in the control room._

"_That was a lot easier than I expected to be," Nat said, sounding disappointed but she holstered her pistol and went up to a keyboard with Russian on the screen. Tony stands guard and looks over his shoulder at his sister._

"_Whatever you're going to do, Nat, do it fast," he urged._

"_Give me a second, I just need the abort codes." She pulled out a flash drive from her pocket and plugged it into the computer. She types in the password and pulls up schematics on the ICBM that was about to be launched. She is horrified by what she finds._

"_What is it, sis?" Tony sensed that something was wrong and looked over his shoulder once again to see Nat staring at the screen. He could sense vibe coming off of her and it felt like she was terrified of something. He approached her but kept facing forward to not be caught off guard. "What's going on, Nat?"_

"_The nuclear missile's destination isn't Russia," she said hushedly, "It's the United States."_

_Tony turns to her and looks at the console to see the estimated projection of the missile. "Three warheads loaded in one RT-2PM2 Topol-M ICBM heading to three different major cities in the US." He shrugs as if this whole thing was a math problem. "So; it's not Russia that's about to be nuked so why care?"_

"_Washington D.C.," Nat lists off the targets, "Philadelphia, New York."_

_Tony got a better look at the screen and did the math in his head before he spoke his analysis aloud: "An estimated kill count of 29,932,169. That is a lot of people I will admit, but if they are not part of our country, then I don't give a fuck what happens to them."_

"_That's almost thirty million souls that are about to be wiped off the face of the earth," she argued fiercely, almost snapping at her brother for his cynicism. "You told me that you wanted to be a superhero when you were a little boy. What happened?"_

"_There are no such things as superheroes unless you count Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye, but those are all characters from the MCU franchise. You and I were trained to kill and our job was to prevent the mukes from nuking Russia, America is not our problem."_

"_We've been trained to kill but it was also business, nothing personal but thirty million people? Thiry million innocent people? I knew what I signed on for when I enlisted in Red Room but even there are a few lines that I will not cross."_

"_Like what?"_

"_For one: I will never kill innocent people. Two: No children. Three: No innocent people._

"_I won't harm children either Nat, but I'm giving you an ultimatum on this one, sis. You either stay here or we can get out of here before we become surrounded by soldiers."_

"_By not doing anything, children will die."_

"_But it is easier to imagine just adults dying in the blast then just kids dying in the blast."_

_She pushed him away by the shoulder and put in the abort codes. "You can leave, I'm staying."_

"_America hates us, they despise us for kicking their ass in the Cold War and the Vietnam War."_

"_If you want to leave because you're such a coward, then that is your choice." She types in the abort codes but an error pops up, saying that the codes are invalid. "Damn it," she mutters before typing in a different set of codes. She can sense the tensity vibrating off of Tony and onto her and tells him that this is his last chance. If he wasn't going to help, then he was going to run away and abandon thirty million people who were about to die for no good reason._

_Tony stood, contemplating a decision. Their orders were to stop the nukes from launching into Russia and then get out of there. Now that his sister was calling the shots, he had no idea what to do. He heard chatter off of a dead soldier's walkie-talkie and knew that more soldiers were on their way to ensure that the launch sequence went through. His fingers were shaking with the stress and pressure piling up. He had no idea what to do and he grunted in frustration. "Fuck it." He shot at the soldiers that came through the door, off each one off until they were all dead. "Well, Madame B. did tell us to stop the nukes from launching, not stop the nukes from launching if the target was Russia. So...I guess it is in our paygrade to stop the nukes because we were ordered to STOP the nukes from launching regardless."_

"_Thanks, brother." Nat puts in the last set of abort codes and the launch sequence starts. "Oh shit."_

_The abort sequence has been activated as well but it will take five minutes for the abort codes to activate and the nuke was getting ready to launch from the silos. She takes back the flash drive, counts the abortion sequence from four minutes and forty-five seconds and tells her brother to run._

_The two siblings run out of the base, passing through several doors, even getting lost and had to retrace their steps before they raced up a set of stairs and were ambushed by a group of soldiers. Tony was pushed up against the wall by two soldiers while one soldier went for Nat and caught her by surprise. He tried slashing for her stomach but she took the knife away and drove it into his chest and killed him slowly._

_Tony kicks the soldier to his left and he falls over a railing and punches the other soldier in the stomach twice before uppercutting him into unconsciousness. He takes his holstered gun and checks it for ammo and throws it to the side. "Why do these guys have to run upon us? Why not just shoot us from a distance?"_

"_Bond Villain Stupidity I guess."_

_The two siblings make it out of the base and make a run for one of the jeeps. They hop in, Tony in the driver's seat and hotwiring the car while Nat is in the back and tells him to hurry up before checking her watch. "Two minutes, get us as far away as you can because that nuke will fly into the sky before the abort codes activate and I don't want to be around when the nuke is falling back towards the ground!"_

_Tony gets the car started and steps on it. They drive off a snowy path, the blizzard clearing away and giving Tony a clear view. He swerves to avoid stress and hammers his foot on the gas once again to pick up the paste. The jeep could only go a hundred and twenty miles per hour and he could practically smell the engine's spark starting to set fire._

"_Think you can go any faster?!" Nat asked, hoping for an answer._

"_We could go faster, only if Quicksilver from those comic books were pushing us!" Tony snapped back in sarcasm._

_Thirty more seconds pass and the ICBM rumbles the ground it is launched into the air and flies up towards the sky. Nat impatiently studies her watch and count backward from ten and when she reaches one, the thrusters in the ICBM seventy miles in the air abruptly stopped and the missile came falling back down the earth._

"_Faster, Tony!" She slapped him on the shoulder, "We're in the blast radius!"_

_The ICBM fell faster to the ground than expected and when it touched down, the nukes inside the missile went off and a gray mushroom cloud lit up the sky and a shockwave rippled all over the mountains. The rippled shockwaves caught up to the jeep and caused it to crash and roll down the mountains._

_Darkness was all that covered Nat's eyes before she pried open her eyes and as slow as a snail, felt an agonizing pain manifest itself into her appendix area. She grabs her side and arches her back with an ear-piercing scream of unbearable agony. She screamed a few more times before she looked down to see a large piece of rebar from the jeep had stabbed her in the side. The rebar, as well as the snow around her, was covered in her blood and the wound was already suffering from frostbite. She tried to hold in her screams but the pain was already unbearable, most likely as a result of the radiation that she may have been infected with as the mushroom cloud as still present in the sky and the sky was a dark red color._

"_TONY!" she called out for her brother but got no answer. "TONY! HELP ME!" She hears a groan of pain in response and turns to her left. Tony was laying face-first into the snow and his Ghost mask was off to the side. He pushed himself up on his knees and reached for his face but felt nothing but his fleshy skin. That's what he thought he felt and reached over for his mask in the ground. Only when he turned the mask around, he realized it wasn't a mask: It was his fleshy face._

_Tony stares at the fleshy torn off face in front of him and starts hyperventilating. He drops the face and crawls over to the mask. As if he needed the mask to breathe, he pulls the mask onto his skull and almost ripped it. He yells in pain as the absence of his faceless pain starts to sink in physically and mentally._

_Nat's screaming ceases when she stares wide-eyed at her brother with his face torn off. The pain in her side increases in unbearable agony and her eyes roll back to the head and the familiar sight of darkness took over._


	2. W

Present Day in Washington D.C - January 2016

Natasha Romanoff woke up with a yawn and felt a pinch on in her inner elbow. When she opened an eye, she saw a mosquito draining blood from her dominant vein. With a smack of her hand, she crushes it and sighs. She pulls herself out of bed slowly before moving over to the treadmill and does a run for about five minutes, barely breaking a sweat in the process. When she finished, she grabbed her clothes and took a shower in her bathroom. She winces in pain as the hot water burns her wound from five years ago.

Natasha Romanoff looked up at herself in the mirror as she gets dressed in her clothes for the day. A pair of black jeans and a white T-shirt were good enough for her. She gets her hair done and puts on makeup. She lifts her shirt and sees a stitch from her wound on her side come off. She uses a paper towel to soak up the blood before fixing the stitch herself. It's been five years since she was stabbed in the side and her wound still refused to heal itself and cause her pain. _That hurt,_ she thought.

Natasha Romanoff went into the kitchen and cut open a bag of Canadian ham, cracked open an egg, and cooked both on two different pans on the stove. She brewed herself ground coffee and added artificial sweetener and four spoonfuls of creamer. Once she was done with the cooking, she sits down at the table, takes a sip of her coffee, dabs Tabasco sauce on her eggs, sunny-side-up eggs, and uses a fork to pick up the cooked ham and take a bite out of it. She made herself a chocolate protein shake before she moved on with her schedule.

Natasha Romanoff went into her closet to put on her real clothes for work. She pulled out a vest and her boots. She double knots her boots, puts her bulletproof vest on, then reaches under her bed to pull out a box. Inside the box were three pistols. She grabs the Makarov PM pistol and puts it in her boot. She takes the Walther PPK and picks it in a holster behind her back. She pulls out her real weapon of choice, the Glock 26 pistol and smiles to herself as she puts it in the holster of her hip.

Natasha Romanoff puts a flannel over her bulletproof vest before taking out parts of her Colt M4A1 and walking out of her apartment building. As she walks down the steps, a neighbor waves to her and she waves back. When she gets at the bottom, a police car with her half-twin brother was inside. He calls out for her and she sits down in the passenger seat. As the police car drives off, she looks out the window, stares out into the city of Washington D.C. and smiles warmly.

She looks at her brother and says, "Hey, little brother."

* * *

"We got a situation that requires all SWAT officers available," Tony Masters said as he wears a balaclava over his face and goggles around his eyes. "There's a shootout near the bank."

Natasha put on her balaclava and helmet that she pulled out from the glove compartment. She cocks her Colt M4A1 gun and looks at Tony before saying, "Let's help them out then."

Tony pulls up to the police shootout and a bullet hits the front window. The two siblings duck down before crawling out of the van in their SWAT uniforms. They slide along the car to a SWAT van that was taking heavy fire. "What's going on?" Nat asked a SWAT officer behind her, "Is this more than a simple bank heist?"

The SWAT officer responded by saying, "It is something much worse." He peeks his head out to see the gunfire coming from inside the windows of the bank. "We've got a large number of hostiles in there. We've counted at least thirteen hostages and each one is rigged with some kind of explosive device. Those bad guys had been spraying the hell out of us all day with bullets."

Nat nods at the officer before crouching down and checking to make sure the magazine in her gun was fully loaded. "I'll take the point in there," she tells the SWAT officer before she jumps to her feet, takes aim, and shoots off into the bank. Bullets come firing back at her but she rolls over like a rug on the ground, takes aim, and squeezes the trigger. Even from a distance, she could hear the cryings of a shooter dying.

All gunfire was directed at her on the ground now. She slides across the ground and under a police car.

Tony pops out from behind cover and shoots every single round he had at the bank and suppressed their firing for several seconds so Nat could move forward and to another squad car.

Tony jumps back into cover and reloads. A SWAT officer captures his attention by asking, "That's your sister?"

"Complicated, but yeah."

"She's a badass."

"She gets that from me."

The police shot back at the robbers while Nat moved forward. She holsters his assault rifle to make it easier to move across the ground. She keeps her head down and stabs behind waist-high cover. She lunges for cover behind a trash can and pulls out her pistol of choice. She somersaults forward and hides behind a pillar. She looks out to see if the robbers could spot her and she ran for the alleyway between the bank and a taller building. The gunfire came shooting out the wall from the side from behind her. She ran faster and jumped for it.

She jumped onto one wall before leaping like a cat and climbing up a ladder leading to the roof. Once she makes it inside the roof, she looks for the closest ventilation shaft that was large enough for her to fit through. "Gonna have to sacrifice my M4A1, hope that Stevens doesn't get upset with me back at the department." She puts her assault rifle against the vent and climbs inside the air vent.

"Climbing in an air vent like a spider, just as I imagined my day would go today." She crawls across the ventilation shaft like a spider, looking down the grates beneath her to keep track of her enemies.

Natasha crawls to an air grate and uses all of her strength to push it off. She gripped it by the bars so when she does push it off, it wouldn't fall to the ground and make a loud noise and alert the shooters. She holds onto the grate as she crawls through and sees that she's twenty feet above the ground. "Shit," she curses, realizing that she couldn't figure out a way down. "Now what?" She answers her question by looking forward and sees a dangling light within arm's reach. She calculated that the dangling light would be able to support her weight.

She places the grate inside the air vent and reaches out. With a leap made from the strength in her upper body, she swung over to the dangling lamp, relieved that it didn't break due to her weight. Like Indiana Jones using his whip, she swings to the next lamp and grabs it to swing across. When she reaches the last dangling light, she just jumps for the wall behind it and clings onto a handhold protruding from the wall. She pulls herself up. There was a narrow walkway alongside the wall that allowed her to stand but she had to maintain as much balance as possible and she had to keep her back pressed against the wall.

She moves along the narrow walkway to look at the hostiles inside. She whispered very softly to herself as she records her analysis. "Ten bad guys total. Three dead, seven that are about to be. Four shooting at the police outside and three keeping thirteen hostages in check inside the bank vault." She narrows her eyes and sees wiring wrapped around each hostage that tied them together, like when prisoners get off the bus and they're all connected by chains around their ankles. "Sensitive wiring all interconnected to one bomb that has to be placed inside the bank vault. If so much as a string is ripped, the bombs will go off…" She looks for any signs of the bomb and could only deduce that they were already in the bank vault with the hostages.

"Innocent people put in the crossfire just to ensure one's survival?" She shook her head, "Unacceptable." But then she studies the kind of tripwire being used. "If I cut the wires in a specific order, the bombs won't go off. Sensitive tripwires usually work in sequential order. If one doesn't go off then the others won't go off."

She climbs down and jumps onto a bookshelf but hoped that the loud thud could be misinterpreted to the shooters as a gunshot. She hopes to the ground and rolls underneath a desk.

"Gotta secure the hostages first." She pulls out her radio and calls in her brother. "Tony, there are thirteen hostages inside the bank vault, all tied together by an explosive tripwire. I need you and your crew to make as much noise as possible so I can take out the ones guarding the hostages."

"No problem," Tony immediately responded.

Nat waited several minutes before police started firing rapidly at the robbers and forced them to take cover. The three guarding the hostages went over to help their companions return fire. "That just made my job easier." Nat quickly ran for the bank vault. She hid behind one of the hostages and took out a knife. The hostages were terrified but once they saw her SWAT uniform, they knew that she could be trusted. Each one kept their mouth shut as possible (even with gags in their mouths).

She cuts the string of wires in a certain pattern so they won't go off. _All that training in the Red Room paid off._

"You'll be fine," she tells the traumatized hostages. She looks behind her and sees one of the robbers directing the hostage-takers to get back to their stations. Nat instantly thought of something and she took out her Glock 26.

When the three came running back, they saw the body of a redheaded woman laying down in front of the bank vault. The hostages appeared to still have the wires wrapped around and when one of the robbers went to investigate, Nat bursts to life and shoots the robber in the head. She finishes the other two off before they could even raise their guns.

Two of the four robbers up front were shocked to see Nat up and about and turn their guns on her. The SWAT woman evades their aim of gunfire and hides behind a desk that was several feet away from the bank vault. She reloaded her pistol and jumped to her feet and with having less than a second to aim, hits the first robber in the head before using Mozambique Drill on the second one.

The two remaining robbers turned to face Nat but the wall to their side exploded as a SWAT van came plowing through. One of the robbers was standing in the way and thrown back against the ground.

Tony jumps out of the SWAT van and kicks the gun out of the hands of the remaining robber. He holds his hands out, subtle showing that this was his harmless way of asking for a challenge. He removed his bulletproof vest but kept his balaclava and sunglasses on.

Nat lined up her sights but took her finger away from the trigger, letting her younger brother have his fun.

The robber attacks Tony, punching him everywhere he could. He aimed mostly for his stomach and his face yet Tony flinched as much as a statue would when punched in the face. Tony grabs the next punch by the robber's knuckles and uses all the strength in his arms to crush the bones inside.

The robber yells in pain and it turns on Tony to see the robber crying in agony. He had something of a sick and twisted mind but when it came to robbers like the one he had in his hand, he wanted to inflict whatever pain he could on him for putting innocent people in danger. Tony smirks under his mask and brings his knee underneath the robber's jaw. He releases the robber's knuckles to let him stagger back. He dodges a punch coming from the robber's intact hand. He dodges the blow before doing an uppercut elbow.

Tony's photographic reflexes start kicking in. After doing a current up-to-date Marvel challenge, watching all the MCU movies in chronological order starting from_ Iron Man_ up _Ant-Man_, he was sure that his fighting skills were advanced enough to take out one thug. He starts kicking the robber away attacks the robber, punching him everywhere he could, (duplicating Captain America's fighting style). He aimed mostly for his stomach and his face and when he punched the robber in the face (duplicating Hawkeye's fighting style), he flinched as much as any human inexperienced in combat would when delivered a solid punch (duplicating Thor's fighting style).

He knocks the robber out cold by throwing a roundhouse kick to his jaw (duplicating Phil Coulson's fighting style). He smiles under his balaclava, taking off his sunglasses and looks at his sister. "Thanks for letting me have that victory."

"No problem." Nat releases the hammer on before she holsters her pistol and instructs the hostages to come out of the bank vault. She collects as much of the bombing wire as she could and handed it all over to the incoming bomb squad as police officers came in to arrest the two surviving robbers.

Also, Nat had managed to retrieve her gun from the roof.

Tony opens the front doors and allows himself and his older sister to walk out with the hostages and police following him. More SWAT officers went inside the bank to secure the building and the two siblings knew that their job was done. Tony and Nat reunite with the police chief.

Nat tells the chief, "All hostages are secure and all but two of the robbers are dead." She nods at her brother, "Good job, little brother."

"No," Tony said, "Good job to you, big sister."

Nat pats her little brother before he walks away. Nat tells the other police officers and SWAT at the scene a good job for their work. As Nat turned to walk away, someone in the crowd behind the police tape started clapping. Nat froze and looked at this man before more people started clapping along and cheering for Natasha Romanoff specifically. She realizes a few seconds later that the people clapping were the hostages she saved.

"Good job, Romanoff," a SWAT officer praises.

Nat does a three-sixty turn, realizing that almost everybody in the crowd was cheering for her. It almost brought a tear to her eye. _Almost._ She rubs her eyes before silently nodding, a sign of your welcome to the hostages. She climbs back in the passenger seat of Tony's car and looks out the window to the grateful crowd.

_Red Room assigning me here was the best thing that happened to me. _

* * *

Natasha and Tony took a ride back to the police station where they discarded their gear. Tony, refused to remove the mask from his face and walked around for the rest of the day with a pair of sunglasses and a balaclava on.

Nat went to her work station and she sat down in her chair. For the first thirty minutes after sitting down, fellow officers came over to her desk to congratulate her on her latest works in stopping the bank robbers. She acted with modesty, saying that it was the work of the police department. Thirty minutes later, she turned on her computer and opened up an encrypted chat room.

She types _January 6, 2016, Washington D.C., Natasha Romanoff stopped a bank robbery downtown with the help of Tony Masters._

She waits for a reply, stretching her arms out as she waited before a message popped up on the screen, reading: _Excellent work. Madame B. is impressed._ She has no idea who she is talking to, except a high-ranking agent of the Red Room.

She types back: _Natasha Romanoff is waiting for a real operation to come through, questions when she cancels this 'normal' life as a SWAT officer._

_Patience, Operation White Widow is in full effect and will take place as soon as tomorrow._

Natasha's eyes stare at the screen, making sure that every word on the screen was authentic. She stares off into space, remembering _hearing_ about Operation White Widow but not knowing what it was.

_Natasha Romanoff: What is Operation White Widow exactly?_

_I apologize, are you the one who graduated at the top of the Red Room class?_

_No._

_This information is priceless. You are clearance Level 6; White Widow is a Level 8 operation._

"Shit," Natasha curses her favorite word under her breath again.

_Is there anything that Natasha Romanoff is authorized to hear?_

She sends it in and waits. As she waited, she realized that she referred to herself in the third person every time she typed. She would've said 'I' but she was prohibited from saying 'I' if she was referring to herself directly. Thirty seconds pass and the reply comes back. It was one word but simple.

"_Nyet._"

She writes the last of her secure browser conversation, saying goodbye to whatever Red Room agent that she was talking to and closes out the secure browser. She leaned back in her chair and spins in circles anxiously before her brother walks over.

"What's up, Tony?" She stares at his eyes, the only thing of his real face visible through the balaclava and notes the healed up scars around the eyes. "I know you didn't come here to inquire about my day."

"No, I just wanted to see how much I could annoy you until you kick me in the balls." He tried to silence himself but he snickered. "Sorry, that's why I'm here." He puts his hands in his pockets as if he was about to pull out something. "Although…"

"Just get on with it before I do kick you in the balls."

"Do you think you could make it for dinner tonight at my place?"

As if she was bored, she rested her chin on her hand. "Why?"

"You know my beautiful wife and adorable daughter," he answers as he thinks about his wife and daughter, "You've been living all by yourself in an apartment..."

"Independently."

"And my daughter barely gets to see you anymore. Jeanne misses you and I thought that it would be good to see her again. Don't you want to see your niece?"

_Trying to guilt me, huh?_ "Of course, I wouldn't miss seeing my adorable niece for the world." Nat smiled warmly and got up to her feet. She shakes his hand as if she were offering him a business deal. "I'm always free to see my niece. Free and happy. Any time, anywhere. Just tell me the time and I'll be there."

"Seven o'clock."

"Consider myself already present. Anything I should bring?"

"Six-pack of beer, and root beer so Jeanne doesn't feel like a pariah." He doesn't miss the smile on her face and neither the computer with the encrypted network on the screen. It doesn't take him too long to recognize that she was using an encrypted network to communicate with an overseas Red Room agent. "Calling your boyfriend in the Red Room?"

"FYI: I'm too good to have a boyfriend, ask Alexei...and a Red Room agent was talking about said something called Operation White Widow and how it is in full effect starting tomorrow."

"What the hell is Operation White Widow?"

"It's level 8 and the two of us are level 6 so we are on a need-to-know basis."

"No point in dwelling on what kind of operation it is then." He shrugs with a heavy sigh. "Even I am left in the dark about what's going on around the world."

Nat chuckles before saying, "Let's just stay updated."

"Speaking of staying updated and not being left in the dark…" Natasha and Tony turned to see an elderly man with gray hair and black sunglasses (**Stan Lee**) approach them with a package in hand. "I got a package for Tony…" he looks down at the label to read the last name, "Bastard."

Nat laughed upon realizing what the old man said, "This is my brother, Tony 'Bastard', he is the very definition as well." She laughs for a few more seconds. "'Natasha Romanoff, here. Tony Bastard, here. Happy birthday dear Tony Bastard.'"

Tony laughs with her and signs for the package before the old man leaves. Tony holds the package in his hands, "You are never going to let that go, are you?" he questions after his laughing sister.

"'Hello, Mr. Bastard,'" she makes fun of her brother, "'Are your parents married?' 'Nope, I'm a bastard.' 'It fits.'"

Tony ignores her and uses his pocket knife to cut open the box. Inside the box, was pulled out by Tony himself to be a mask. Nat examined the mask itself, taking note of every detail like how she did when she was stopping that bank robbery. The mask had a skull that resembled that of the skull from Santa Muerte. She touched the mask, feeling its entire content to be made of some kind of latex rubber like a Halloween mask. When she touched the empty eye sockets, Tony snatched it away from her touch like he was protecting his child from a contagious person. "Get your own Santa Muerte mask."

"Where'd you get it?"

"I requested one of the agents back home back in Russia to make it for me." He rubs his fingers all over the design, eyes never leaving the mask as he was entranced by it. He turns his back to Natasha and the other co-workers and removes his balaclava and tosses it into the closest trash can without even looking.

"You know," Nat says calmly as her brother puts on the mask, "I've seen your face; there's nothing to be ashamed of."

"You would never understand," Tony spat at her as he finished putting the mask. "You got stabbed, my entire face was torn off."

"You've been wearing masks ever since you were a child. The first mask I've ever seen you wore was Jason's mask from _Friday the 13th. _Why?"

"Personal." He tightens the straps around his back as if to make sure that it would never come loose from his face.

"I can never wear bikinis again." She lifts her shirt to reveal her wound stitched up. "I know what you're doing through...to a degree."

Tony turns around with his mask on now, looking at Nat through the empty eye sockets, eyeing her from head to toe to make sure he could see correctly. "How do I look?" he sarcastically puts his hands on his hips. "Do I look sexy enough to kill?"

"Gross," Nat revolted, "I'm your sister."

"Half-twin sister," he points out.

"Still the same." She walked over to him and touches his face mask, imaging as if it weren't in the way. "Tony, you do not need a mask to show the world what you look like. I've seen your face and you're beautiful, little brother."

Tony moved his head away from her hand and groaned in disgust, "I _do_ hear the perversion. Jesus, Nat." He walks away and back to his station. Nat sunk back into her chair with a deep sigh. Suddenly feeling hungry, she reaches into a drawer above her filing cabinet and pulls out a Little Debbie's oatmeal creme pie.

_Nothing beats lunch better than oatmeal creme pie._

Natasha turned her computer on once it shut down due to inactivity and searched up any active crimes in the area.

_This was life in America: Dressing up in a bulletproof outfit and waiting for dispatch to call in SWAT officers to take down heavily armed men. The job was okay, but I love Little Debbies._

Upon seeing that no active crimes were happening in the area, she grabs her belongings like her pistols from her desk and heads out into town.

_Washington D.C., the beautiful capital of the United States. Tony's homeland. I was born and raised in Russia, grew up to become part of the most elite assassin society known to mankind, only to get shipped here for five years for 'information fetching' and 'Johnny-on-the-spot espionage.' I'm an ASSASSIN, not a SPY!_

Natasha Romanoff heads down an alleyway and when she makes it to the end, she sees a homeless man sitting up against the brick wall to her right wearing no shirt. She studied his malnourished form and suddenly felt a pang of sadness in her chest. She pulls out an oatmeal creme pie she brought with and handed it to the homeless man, who accepted it with gratitude. "Enjoy it."

"That was very generous of you to do, ma'am."

Nat looks up and suddenly sees a man dressed in ripped clothing approach her. Judging by his ripped clothing and his bad smell, he was a homeless person, probably jealous because they got no food.

"I'm just a generous person is all," Nat replies. She stands back up and starts to walk before another man steps in front of her and holds a pocket knife at his side. Nat holds her hands up as she tries to persuade, "This is something that you do _not_ want to do. I've had a long and busy day and I'm just trying to get home."

"How come you fed Terrance over here and not us?" the first man asked as he pulled out a pocket knife of his own. "If you're not going to give us food, at least give us your wallet so we can pay for food ourselves."

Nat contemplated just giving them money until she noticed that while they were dressed in dirty clothing and smelled bad, they were not homeless people. Homeless people don't have the strength to threaten people for money. These were just small-time crooks dressed as homeless people.

A perfect opportunity to try out my new move.

Nat reaches into her back pocket, pulls out a matchbook and removes two of the 'matches'. "Only chance to leave me before you guys are going to be screaming in agony."

Without even hesitating, the two men jump her. Nat grabs both of their hands with the knives in them, puts them both in a headlock with both elbows, and stabs them in the back of their necks with the tips of the 'matches'.

"What did you do?!" the first thug asked, suddenly paralyzed in a position with his left arm held out. He twitches with every muscle movement and felt something poke into his neck. "What did you do to us."

"I put an acupuncture needle in your neck." She takes the switchblades from both paralyzed thugs before throwing them to the side.

"What's going to happen to us?"

"You'll be paralyzed like that for a long time until you can remove the needles from your neck. I implanted them in a forbidden place that could kill you. Do you want to get out of this situation? All you have to do is pull the needle out of your neck. Too quickly and it can kill you. Too slowly and it can kill you." She looks at the homeless person she fed and he gets up and moves away from her, understanding that this was her business and he should not intrude. Nat decided that she had enough and walked off down the alleyway. "Ta-ta."

* * *

With Tony

Tony walked around the station, flashing his new mask around and trying to capture the attention of people. He acts modest and returns to his station to pretend that he is working. One of the officers came approaching him, however, and of all people, it had to be Sondra Brandenberg, the skinny (in an athletic way) girl with brown hair and eyes from Columbus, Ohio. The one working in the forensic department as a blood-spatter analyst. Tony was suspicious of her because she worked in blood-spatter and after watching all ninety-six episodes of _Dexter,_ he knew that it was the people in the blood-spatter field you had to watch out for.

"Masters," Sondra says professionally.

"Brandenberg," Tony replies. He turns his head to look at her and he doesn't miss the slight reaction on her face when she sees the skull mask on. "It's custom made," he says randomly as if trying to show off his custom lifestyle, "It cost me thirty dollars and another ten dollars to make it."

_That's a lie, but she doesn't need to know I'm an assassin for the world's most elite group of assassins._

"I think you look cute in it," she says almost sheepishly, "I think it suits you."

"Thank you." _Someone, please shoot me and this fangirl off my back._ "How are you doing today?"

"I've been doing well. I also heard what you did inside the bank."

_Someone shoot me, cut me open with a chainsaw, and dump my remains in the Atlantic ocean._ "What do you think?"

"You're brave for going up against a bank robber."

"Thank you but it was the department as a whole who did all the heroic work." He studies her, trying to find the reason why Sondra approached him in the first place so he did the polite thing and asked cynically, "Why are you here."

"I just wanted to chat with you, that's all."

Tony warned her before things advanced, "I have a wife and a daughter." He nods to the framed picture of them on her desk...and he was wearing a mask on even in the picture. "She's the best a guy like me could ask for. I'm lucky to have her."

Sondra nods at him before she explains that she already knew about them, "You always talk about Mercedes and Jeanne but to me, it sounds like she might be the lucky one to have you." _Great, the girl who has a massive crush on me is getting the message._ "And just to clarify, I'm only here as a friend, not as a crush; I don't even have a crush on you."

_What?_

Tony's heart dropped to his stomach and he winced like he was getting a shot. _She was pursuing me but now she's telling me she DOESN'T have a crush on me?_ Tony balled up his shaking fists but let out a sigh to calm himself down. "Well, I'm glad you're respecting my status as a husband and a father," he lets out, hoping that she would leave afterward but she remained where she stood.

"Of course," she replies and turns back before looking at Tony, where she said, "But I do have one question though?"

He has her full attention. "What's that?"

"How are you and Natasha half-twins?"

The answer that both Nat and himself gave to whoever asked that question was and was almost rehearsed. Even how they would describe it would sound like it was rehearsed for specific occasions like this one: "Complicated."

"Are you two like fraternal twins or something?"

Tony does a so-so gesture. "More than that."

"Identical twins but born a different gender?"

"That's fraternal twins." When he considered her answer, he realized what she was saying. "But I guess you could say that."

"Is there any way you could explain?"

Here comes the rehearsed answer: "Yeah. Me and Natasha share the same father and biological mother, but due to in vitro fertilization, we were born in bodies separate from our biological mother. We were supposed to be born identical twins but our genes changed when we were put in another woman's womb. Unlike identical twins, who share 100% of their genes or fraternal twins with 50%, we share 75% of our genes. We may be twins born in different bodies at the same time, and I mean literally, but the only parent we share in common is our biological father."

Sondra's face froze up like a student being taught someone foreign to her until the teacher explained it and in this subject: Biology. She recollected every word he said and blinked a few times before asking, "Sounds like SyFy or something, how do you feel about that?"

"The only thing I can say about that is 'Why did our man-whore of a father have to force us to be born in different bodies?' For all I know, I could have twenty half-brothers and sisters. Your biological father, he could be _my_ father. Hell, even my father can be your father's father."

Sondra laughed at that last sentence. "Say no more," Sondra said in between laughs, "You don't have to say anymore if you don't want to." Tony was infected by her contagious laughter. Sondra checks her wristwatch for the time and taps against the glass. "I'm afraid I must be getting back to work but I'll see you later, Tony." Before she leaves, she whispers down into his ear and whispers, "I love your skull mask by the way; I've always been curious what your real face looks like."

Tony smiled under his mask as he waved her off. He sighs as he rests his elbows on his knees. "How can she have a crush on me if she doesn't know what my real face looks like?" _Then again, I never showed my face to Mercedes and she loves me. Man, I love physical expressions; makes up for my loss of a face._


	3. 5

To Natasha Romanoff, the best way to relax after a hard day's work was sitting down in the middle of the floor, listening to nothing but the soft sounds of a man's voice coming from the television set, where she played a meditating relaxation video. She laid down flat on the ground, after changing into her civilian clothes, and focused on controlling her breathing. She kept her eyes closed, limbs spread out evenly, and her back laid against the ground as flat as a penny. She lets out a soft breath of air, the only other sounds present in the entire building were the sounds of her fan blades whistling in a circle. She followed the video instructor's breathing methods to the letter and readied herself just in case she had to get up.

Her phone vibrates in the back of her pocket. Nat's eyes opened as if she was tasered and took out her phone. She checked the screen and the time read five-thirty. She had thirty minutes until she was having dinner with her brother. She keeps up to her stance and heads into the refrigerator to make sure she had the six-pack she promised her brother. She also had a six-pack of root beer for her niece just in case. She goes into her room and gets dressed in a pair of light-colored red jeans, high heels, and a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt.

Six o'clock at night, Nat was there on schedule and she didn't know why, but she saw no lights on in the two-story house. None on in the window or on the porch. She knocks on the door and when it opens seconds later after hearing the sounds of locks being removed and opened, there stood a little girl, around the height of three feet and one inch tall, which was the average height of a four-year-old girl, and she had strawberry blonde hair with two different colored eyes. Her left eye was brown and her right eye was blue. It was her niece, holding the door open for her aunt.

"Aunty Natty," the little girl squealed in delight and she ran to hug her aunt tightly.

Nat grunts at the little girl for jumping onto her knees and hugging them. Nat gets down to one knee, hiding the two six-packs of beer and root beer behind her back, and hugs her four-year-old niece tightly. "How are you doing, my little niece?"

"Good, I really missed you Aunty Natty."

"I'm sure you did." Then she asked the obvious question: "What are you doing opening the doors when your mommy and daddy aren't around."

"Because they were already outside waiting for you," Jeanne answered and caused Nat confusion.

"What?"

"HELLO!" someone shouted in her ear from behind. Nat jumps to her feet and almost turns around. Tony was behind Nat and managed to pick one of the beer cans from behind Nat's back without even alerting her of the sudden weight change. He opens up the can with a loud pop and catches her attention. "Hey, sis."

Nat completely forgot that the two packs of beer and root beer were behind her back and were within arm's reach of Jeanne. She witnessed her father grabbing something from behind and she managed to duplicate his pickpocketing skills to the letter and steal a root beer without letting Nat know.

_How's he going to drink that if he has a mask on?_ "Tony, you sneaky son of a…" she remembers Jeanne is in front of her, "Beautiful monster."

"I prefer it if you didn't use that kind of language around my daughter," he said disappointingly and then they both turned to see Jeanne opening up a can of root beer and drinking from it.

Nat looks at her brother in shock, horrified that he taught his own daughter how to pickpocket and how to open a can. "What kind of father teaches their daughter to steal a beer?"

"I didn't teach her," he defended himself, "She has photographic reflexes herself like me but she is still learning to cope with them." He picks up his daughter and walks into the house before turning back to Nat, "Talk about like father, like daughter. And shut the door behind you."

"Hey," Nat calls out jokingly, "I'm supposed to be giving orders to my little brother." She obeys him nevertheless and shuts the door. She put the 'five' pack of beer and root beer on the kitchen counter and looked around Tony's small house in the suburbs with two stories only several miles outside of Washington D.C. No bigger than forty square feet and more than enough room to put in _three_ television sets. "This place is bigger than my apartment in D.C.," she said to herself, "I've always preferred living in the city."

"Natasha," a new voice called out as someone came walking through one of the halls that Tony took his daughter in.

Natasha looked up to see a woman with dark hair dyed a purple color. It took Nat a moment to realize who it was before realizing that it was Mercedes Merced-Masters. _Wow, three M's for her initials_. "Mercedes." She goes over to hug her tightly and even kisses her on both cheeks in a polite way. "Has my brother been treating you properly and vice versa?"

"Actually," Mercedes began as she nodded, "Because of your brother's photographic reflex superpower, _I've_ been taking care of _him_; he actually forgot that I was his wife for a whole day."

Nat's heart skipped a beat at the thought of her brother forgetting someone important in his life like his wife, his daughter, or even his own sister. "That's something he was born with and if they made a cure…"

"I understand," Mercedes said, "But he says that while he may forget who we are, he always recognizes us."

"I promise you that we are done with that whole spy/assassin thing back in Russia." _Except for the fact that I'm now aware of some kind of operation known as Operation White Widow._

"What spy business?" Tony asks as he walks back into the room with Jeanne in his arms, "When I was a spy?"

_His memory's acting up again._ "The two of us used to be spy/assassins for Red Room, remember? We failed to become Black Widows and we're sent here to America, remember?" She didn't need to worry about Mercedes and Jeanne hearing that because both of them were well-aware of their lives prior to coming to America. They knew about the Red Room Academy, their failure at becoming Black Widows, and how Tony lost his face and Aunt Natty getting stabbed in the side. _Why should I tell him this: He barely watches MCU movies in order to NOT override his personal memories._

Tony's memory came back to him, rolling at a speed equal to that of a car rolling down a hill and slaps himself for his stupidity. "Stupid memory loss, I'm sorry sis."

"Not your fault you were born with a rare genetic mutation in your brain." She pauses for a minute to look for the next question, "What's on the menu for tonight?"

"Steak and baked potatoes."

_I hate steak and baked potatoes._ "I love steak and baked potatoes." She gave a thumbs up.

Tony had cooked and served the food and Nat was sitting down with her family and having difficulty cutting her steak. She's experienced with all kinds of knives. She's had experience with knives. _I've literally used all kinds of knives. Butcher knives, chef's knives, bread knives ...wait a minute._

"It's like this, Aunty Natty," Jeanne says as she grabs Nat's steak knife and cuts the steak for her, "I saw Daddy doing it and I copied him."

"Wow," Nat said with impressiveness. She looked up at Jeanne and saw her father in her eyes. She realized that her niece must've inherited her father's photographic reflex mutation _indeed_. That means she could have her personal memories overridden over even do things that normal four-year-olds can't do and it was terrifying for Nat. She's four-years-old but knows how to cut steak with a knife and not get cut and who else knows what she could do. Nat smiles warmly at her niece and rubs the back of her head before saying in a proud voice that she did not cut herself, "Good job. Like your father, you're a copycat."

Tony shot her a look through his skull mask.

"And that's a good thing, little brother." Before she eats up the cut up pieces of steak, she looks back up at her brother and asks, "How do you intend on eating if you have a mask on?"

Tony smiles under his mask and stabs at a piece of steak with his fork and lifts up his mask so only his mouth was visible. He eats it from there before putting his mask back on to chew.

"Tony, take off your mask," Nat orders. He doesn't budge and takes another steak and eats it like he did the other one. "Tony, take off your mask for the umpteenth time."

Tony slams his fists down on the table and startles Mercedes and Jeanne. He looks over at Jeanne's innocent expression on her face and bows his head down in shame. He grabs the top of his mask and pulls it over his face. He had his Ghost ski mask on underneath that was pulled up to show his mouth.

"How many masks do you have? Off with it, brother." Tony obliges and removes his ski mask. "There you go, nothing to be ashamed of, little brother."

Tony looked down but with his head up and facing his sister. To say his face was torn off would be an understatement. Not only was the skin missing from his face and exposing the top layer of his muscles, but his nose was also missing as well. His lips were peeled off completely and exposed his bony teeth, his eyelids pulled down his eyes slightly to reveal the bottom parts of his eyeballs; it actually effort to blink his eyes. But at least he still had his curly reddish-brown hair. He stabbed a piece of steak and ate with his bony teeth chewing down on the steak. He picked up a can of beer and waterfalled from it.

"Daddy," Jeanne called out innocently after seeing the depressed look in her daddy's eyes, "I think you look handsome with your ugly face."

Tony looks up at her and smiles as a bony skeleton would smile. He leans in and kisses her but since he had no lips, he kissed her with his teeth. "Thanks for that."

"Tony," Mercedes calls to him, "Don't ever think you have to hide your face from us." She grabs his chin. "This is the face I fell in love with."

_Like Beauty and the Beast those two are. _Natasha smiled. _Except Beast was cursed while I may have played a role in his disfigurement. But, he never took his mask even before he lost his face. And I'm pretty sure his disfigured face has nothing to do with why he wears a mask. He always said it was for personal reasons_. "So what made you decide to invite me to dinner."

"Yelena Belova and Grant Ward are back in town," he said after taking a bite of his steak, "They said they wanted to meet up with us, saying that they had some kind of important news or something."

"I thought we failed the Black Widow trials."

"We did, but for some reason, they're requesting _our_ presence."

"Do you trust them, you sound like you're not trusting them."

Tony shook his head, "No, I trust them, I'm just contemplating if I should even meet up with them."

_So he didn't invite me just to chat with me. Or maybe he did but just forgot. Damn photographic reflexes. _"Why?" Nat was curious as to why her own little brother was considering not meeting up with their fellow Red Room agents. They've been stationed in America for five years, under orders to update them on their daily activities and now that the Red Room was coming to America (if they weren't already in America) then that means that something big must be going on. She was wondering if this had something to do with Operation White Widow, then decided that Operation White Widow is nothing to be concerned about. She could probably ask Yelena and Ward about it but they probably wouldn't tell her anymore then what the Red Room agent told her on her encrypted chat room.

"I love my normal life too much to leave for the Red Room once again," Tony answered honestly, "I have a wife and a daughter."

Nat understood what her brother was saying but she kept thinking back fifteen years ago when she failed the Red Room. Someone else graduated at the top of their class and was given the Black Widow serum. She spent ten years as one of the best agents there but she was no Black Widow; just a regular spy with no superpowers at all.

_As if superpowers even existed._

"I understand what you're saying brother, but if you were considering not doing anything, then why come to me?"

He shrugs as if he didn't know before clarifying, "I thought that this would be something you'd be interested in. You live like a lonely loser in your apartment and I thought this would be something up your alley."

Nat laughs with her brother before mentioning to him, "I really appreciate the offer. You should still tag along; it's probably just a formality, a meeting of some kind. A reunion, possibly." _One hell of a reunion, possibly._

He eyes her like she was crazy, "Red Room agents never regroup with former members or overseas members just to 'hang out'."

"Who knows, there could be a chance," she suggests slyly. She takes a sip of her beer before looking over at Jeanne to see her drawing at the kitchen table. She shows her Aunty Natty her drawing of her and she smiles warmly. "My little niece," she lays a kiss upon her forehead.

Mercedes looks over back to Tony, "I think you should take up this reunion with your buddies." He looks up at her in surprise and she repeats what she said, "I mean it, you should really do this."

"Why?"

"Because of your association with the Red Room. What if they need you?"

"Nobody needs me as you and Jeanne do." He realized where he went wrong in his sentencing and pointed out his mistake. "That did not come out quite the way I hoped. What I meant to say was the only people I need in my life is my family."

"Didn't the Red Room assign you to work undercover in America?"

Nat looks at the couple exchanging the conversation. _Not undercover anymore._ She takes Jeanne up from her seat and takes her into the living room to sit on the couch. She lets her brother and his wife hash it out while she talks to her little niece.

"So what have you been up to, my little niece?" she asks politely as she starts scribbling down on more paper. She scoots in closer to see what her little niece was drawing. She 'drew' an amused smile upon drawing Tony with a regular face with a happy smile on. "Is that your daddy?"

Jeanne nods, "He's happy in this photo."

She reaches over to grab an extra piece of paper. She takes out a couple of crayons and starts doodling with Jeanne. She kept occasionally looking over her shoulder to see Tony and Mercedes talking more but she muted out their conversation. Curiosity got the better of her when she was drawing and her eyes perked upon hearing Tony says, "You win, I give up. I'll go with Natasha on this reunion but nothing else."

She mentally cheers in her head before she goes back to drawing pictures. When she spotted her brother, she nodded at him, silently telling him 'good job'.

Jeanne then held up a picture and it was a realistic drawing of her father with a regular face. She had copied down a realistic artist's style and used it to draw her father. "Your mommy and daddy must be proud of you, my little niece."

* * *

"Are you sure you don't need me to drive you home?" Tony, with his skull mask on, asks Nat as she walks through the front door, stopping to turn and give her answer.

"I walked here in the first place," she said, "I can jog my way back." She waves goodbye to him and Jeanne as she stands by her father's knees. She waves goodbye one last time to her before she heads walks down the dark streets with nothing but street lights to illuminate her path.

Washington D.C. was quieter at night in the rental apartment areas. Nothing but the sound of crickets chirping replaced the sounds of total silence as Nat walked along the sidewalk with her hands in her pockets. She turns a corner and walks down an endless sidewalk before she feels a vibrating feeling in her pocket. She was at first confused before she felt something buzz against her hand and made her realize that it was just her phone.

She opens her phone but continues walking. She dials up the brightness on the phone so she could see better and checks her emails. The Red Room agent she's been chatting with sent her an invite to the encrypted chat room. She accepts it and reads a message that said:

Red Room Agent: How did dinner with Tony Masters go?

Nat halts and stopped abruptly in the center of a street light beam. She makes sure she reads correctly before she types in and sends an encrypted message back.

Nat: How the hell did you know that?

Red Room Agent: We are always watching. Are you going to take us up on the offer to meet up with Belova and Ward?

Nat: I'm going and so is my brother.

Red Room Agent: That is delightful news, Miss Romanoff. We've got a lot to discuss.

Nat: You'll be there with Belova and Ward?

Red Room Agent: I've read from your file that you've waited fifteen years to meet the one, true, Black Widow, correct?

Nat: Da.

Red Room: You'll have your chance when you meet up with Belova and Ward tomorrow.

Nat's interest was piqued, curious as to who the one who graduated at the top of the class that she failed actually was. She was curious as to who the Black Widow was. She was happy to meet the Black Widow along with Yelena and Ward. She types in her last response to the Black Widow before closing up her phone and continuing her walk home.

She walks for several more minutes before she reaches her neighborhood. She crosses the street before her keen ears pick up on something behind her. She hears the sound of a pebble rolling across the sidewalk and in a haste, turns around and draws her hidden pistol from her hip holster. She aims the barrel of the gun at a silhouette concealed in darkness. He panics and raises his arms in surrender. She ignores him and lines the sights up to where she believed the man of average height had his head. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't pop your skull off," she says to her assumed stalker.

"Wait," her stalker pleaded with her, "I wasn't trying to startle you, I promise."

She quickly caught on to him saying he didn't mean to 'startle' her. The voice seemed to hit a familiar note in her voice and she recognized the voice belonging to the mugger from earlier. He was back and he knew what street she lived on. Before she could decide on pulling the trigger, she was grabbed from behind and tackled. His friend was back and just as she escaped from the second attacker's grip and aimed the gun at his head, there was a third and fourth attacker that grabbed her from behind and dragged her away by the arms. The gun slips between her fingers, so do her hands through her attacker's grips.

She attacks both the third and fourth attacker, unleashing her martial arts skills on them. She blocks the third attacker's kick with her leg and kicks him in the side of the knee and broke his leg. Without missing a beat, she drops her knee down onto the fourth attacker's foot just as he was about to kick and push him down by the leg, breaking his foot.

The stalker's friend dived for the gun on the ground, stomach hitting the concrete as he grabs the gun and aims it above him. Nat kicks the friend in the face before kicking the gun up into the air and catching it like a baseball. She looks up in time to see her stalker from earlier charging at her. She raises her gun and does not hesitate to pull the trigger.

The stalker's brains splatter out the back of his skull as he falls over dead. The loud gunshots make her flinch slightly. Nat looks down at the corpse and suddenly feels sick. She contemplated the fate of the other three attackers before deciding that killing them in their sleep was too cruel.

"Honestly," Nat says to the corpse, "If it takes four men to do it, then are you really considered men?" She chambers the gun before putting it back into her hip holster and takes out her phone to call the police station she worked. She reports the body but doesn't stick around.

She locks herself in her house, strips down to her undergarments before heading into the bathroom to check her scar. She examines the scar in the mirror and puts her index and middle finger to it, tracing over the stitches that she had to fix up from earlier. She moves one stitch out of place and the bleeding happens again.

"What the hell's wrong with this scar?"

She stitches up her old injury again and washes the blood on her fingertips off with sink water.

After that, she goes to her bed, lays down in it and drifts off to sleep. Most of the nights, she dreamt of nothing; seeing nothing but darkness. But tonight was different.

* * *

_Fifteen Years Ago_

"_How are you feeling, Nat," asked a pretty blond woman with a muscular physique as Nat came out of the experimentation room with her younger brother. Tony walked away while Nat turned to Yelena Belova. Her mouth was still hurting from the parasite being shoved down her throat._

"_The rule is if you can swallow a parasitic worm and not upchuck within three minutes, then you become superhuman but the process was extremely painful," she described, "It was a failure."_

"_How?" Yelena questioned._

_Nat explained, "They told me that since I upchucked the parasitic worm, I am not qualified to become a Black Widow agent. That parasitic worm being shoved down your throat hurt like hell though._

_Yelena heard what her friend said but focused more on: "They force a parasite down your throat?"_

_Nat nodded with a forced smile, "It tastes like rotten eggs, makes you gag, and it is extremely painful as hell as I've already mentioned." She recalled the painful sensations down her throat and gagged herself, "Probably the worst feeling I've felt so far."_

_Yelena winces at the picture she was describing and imagines her in that situation. She winces as if she was actually having the parasite shoved down her throat before she shook her head to clear her mind. "Why does everything have to come with a cost and a painful parasitic tapeworm shoved down your throat?"_

"_Yes," Nat says again, "If I could get any more graphic with my description, I would do it for you," she said sarcastically. She walks around Yelena but the Red Room associate chases after her and grabs her by the shoulder, "What is it, Yelena?"_

"_You just sound upset," she answers to her friend, "Are you sad you didn't become a Black Widow or something?"_

"_Am I upset?" Was she really going to complain about this like a little girl? Then again, when she signed up to be a Red Room assassin on her eighteenth birthday, she had been training ahead of time. She was eighteen but she was a grandmaster black belt in sambo, krav maga, Kung fu, Muay Thai, taekwondo, advanced jiu-jitsu, and even wrestling. She mastered parkour at the age of eleven and graduated at the top of her class in advanced gymnastics at the age of twelve. A Black Widow agent is an elite spy/assassin that does missions that would be deemed impossible by most agencies. The Red Room wasn't known to a lot of people and she was lucky to discover it in the first place. She's trained since she was four for this opportunity and it hurt to know that she wasn't going to be a Black Widow. Although, she doesn't recall anything about the Black Widow actually having superpowers. Her brother, who basically is a textbook copycat of people around him, was also turned down by the tapeworm but instead of becoming a Black Widow, he would've become the male equivalent: The Hourglass. She has been training to become a Black Widow ever since she discovered their existence at the age of four. So was she going to complain like a little girl?_

_She definitely has the right to._

"_I'll get over it," she tells Yelena, "Plenty of other opportunities out there in the world."_

"_You want to know something, Natasha?"_

_Nat looks at her in the eyes, "What would that be?" she says with suspicion._

"_Luck might be on your side," she patted her friend on the back, "If you didn't get to pass as a Black Widow agent, you'll get a shining chance at something else."_

"_Oh really," Nat challenges, "You really want to go there? Plenty of other opportunities at something else."_

"_So what if you don't pass. If you didn't make it a Black Widow agent, then maybe it was fate and that you were meant to be something else."_

"_I've trained my whole life to become a Black Widow assassin because I wanted to be the best of the best. Why did you sign up for the Red Room."_

"_I was-" Yelena stuttered, "I enlisted because my father used to be a Red Room agent. My father was everything to me growing up, my whole world. My mother died perished in an accident involving an avalanche in Moscow when I was two and my father raised me. Sadly, he passed away during the Chernobyl disasters fifteen years ago in 1986. I was five at the time."_

"_In a way, I know how you feel. I only know my father by his first name, Ivan, and I grew up with him absent in my life. Tony and I, we were supposed to be born identical twins, boy, boy, girl, girl, either one. But something happened when we were put through an in-vitro fertilization process. We came out with a twenty-five percent different set of genes but we still shared seventy-five percent genes."_

"_What?"_

"_We're half-twins. Ivan was our biological father and Hannah was our biological mother. I don't know what happened exactly, but I was told that Ivan did not want children and ordered an abortion. Hannah couldn't go through with it so she turned to science to remove us from her womb. Natalia Romanoff was the name of the womb who took me in her womb. Elizabeth Masters was Tony's new mother. We were both born at the exact same time but didn't reconnect with each other until we were ten."_

"_How does this relate to me?"_

"_Sorry, got a little side-tracked for a second. What I was trying to say is that I know what it is like to have Daddy issues."_

"_I held my father's hand as he died and he made me promise him one thing before he passed away. I would tell you but I can't right now."_

"_Understandable." Nat sits down on a bench and Yelena sits down next to her. "You ready for that extremely painful Black Widow testing process?"_

"_No way," Yelena shook her head, "I've already had a tapeworm in my stomach when I was ten and living at an...orphanage...and it was the worst experience of my life."_

"_I'm sure. But, I'm still going to try until I can make it as a Black Widow. That is, if you don't pass."_

"_Keep trying and trying and trying until you eventually get it, Nat. You've trained yourself ever since you were a little girl…"_

"_And sometimes my mother raising me would order private instructors to have one-on-one training with me."_

"_But when you're trained at the Red Room, you have to go through a different kind of training. The most unconventional training you've ever come across. I've been training here and the fighting style is unlike anything I've seen before._

"_Can you elaborate?"_

"_Unlike regular martial arts, you are trained to kill with one punch, paralyze someone with one punch, break someone's neck without blinking an eye. They'll teach you how to be a killing machine and it will cost you a piece of yourself. It will cost a lot compared to anything you've paid for. Figuratively speaking of course."_

"_I got that part."_

"_You've been training here for a while but you're only learning the fundamentals. I've been training here since I was...eighteen years old. I've come to understand the rules around her. It is traumatizing."_

_Nat sighs heavily at the thought of killing a man. She has never killed a man before._

"_And also, you can't have kids as well."_

_Nat looks at her sudden off-topic question. "What?"_

"_They have a graduation ceremony. Once you make it as a Black Widow spy/assassin, they'll sterilize you so you can't have children. According to Madame B., 'Children ruin everything and we don't need a fugitive from our bodies to be disrupting our missions.'_

_Now, Nat's desire for the Black Widow title seems to have lessened. Was she really going to give up having kids just so she can kill people? She was raised without a (biological) mother and father and wondered what it would be like to have a child. She never even thought of sterilization but so far, she didn't want that part of her taken away._

"_Thanks for letting me know either way, Yelena" she put a hand on her shoulder, "You're probably the only friend that I've had in a long time."_

_Yelena sports a confused look. "I am?"_

_She nods. "Yeah."_

"_I've never had a friend before."_

"_Well, you got a friend now."_

_Awkwardly, the two tried to bump fist before their hands opened to high five then back to fists. Before it could get any awkward, Nat decides to just hurt her but Yelena was flinching as if she had never been hugged before...which was probably the case._

_As Yelena stood up and went into the experimentation room with Madame B., Nat took a moment to reflect on her decision of becoming a Black Widow, weighing both the pros and cons._

_Just because you're a Black Widow doesn't mean you can't have kids, she thought to herself, And have to kill your husband during sex. _

* * *

Fifteen years later in the present day. Every yearly test for Red Room agents, she would fail although a part of her thinks she subconsciously failed on purpose so she won't be sterilized. Either way, she would always come in second place yet the actual winner of the Black Widow mantle would never be revealed. While the true identity of the bearer of the Black Widow has been a mystery for fifteen years, she hopes that this would change when she meets up with Yelena and Ward tomorrow.

As the flashback of hers slowly draws to fade to black, rapid flashes start coming through her vision. Her head turns from right to left as she tries to shake out the images. They refused to leave like an annoying housefly. She squeezes her eyes tighter and grasps the sheets around her bed tightly and winces in pain. Her eyes snapped open and she jumped to a sitting position.

"Shit," she curses at herself and rubs her eyes, "Rapid flashes like PTSD happening now?" She falls back into her slumber and closes her eyes again but she suddenly couldn't go back to sleep. She sits up again and throws the blankets off of her bare legs. She buries her face in her hands as she tries to remember what the flashes were about. She could vaguely remember seeing Tony's face ripped off in the incident and the rebar slowly being pulled out of her stomach. She remembers seeing that she had to get an appendectomy...while awake and the only thing keeping her from screaming in agony was the fact that she was intoxicated due to vodka.

She feels something wet in her side and looks down to see her scar has reopened once again and blood was spilling out. She curses at the sight of passive blood patterns on the bed before deciding to wrap her scar wound in gauze tightly and dive back into bed after changing the bloody sheets. She sinks back into her slumber and closes her eyes and waits for sleep to kick in...only for her alarm clock to go off ten seconds later.


	4. 2

In a nuclear sub of the coast of the North Sea

A lone captain sitting by himself in a cair in a control took a sip of coffee as he stayed updated on the latest news. He reads how economic power has increased by three percent for the federal government, giving them more security access to countries like Russia, China, France, and Germany. He turns the page and reads an article on how the Russians were outraged with America's success and they were trying to find a way to counteract their success. "Some people just can't take the heat," he says to himself as he takes another sip of his coffee. He sets the mug down before looking at his watch.

"Holt," the Navy captain calls out to his first mate, "It's six in the morning, time for your shift." He rolls up his newspaper and finishes the rest of his coffee. He looks down the sub's hallway and tries to listen for the sounds of footsteps. The silence makes him nervous as he pulls out his walkie-talkie to call in his first mate. "Holt, are you there?" He puts the communicator up to his ear and listened for something else aside from static. "Holt, get down here; that's an order, understand?"

"Son of a bitch." He grabs his belongings and walks down the hall to look for Holt himself to berate the soldier for not following simple orders. He heads into Holt's quarters to see the back of a soldier in blue sitting at a desk. The captain steps in and barks at the soldier.

"I called you three times, what the hell are you doing in here?!"

No response from the soldier. The captain walks closer to the soldier and starts talking again. He calls the soldier offensive names for not following his simple commands and grabs the soldier by the back of the neck.

The soldier gives no visible reaction to the officer grabbing him by the back of the neck. He suddenly gets an idea and moves around the soldier sitting down to see his eyes gouged out with blood streaming down his cheeks. His mouth was open and tongue hanging out. His neck had a protuberance down the middle that looked like a bone was sticking out. The only thing keeping the soldier from falling forward was the fact that some kind of invisible fishing line was suspending his head above his decapitated body to make it look like he was still alive.

The lone captain gasps in terror and turns to run out the room before the familiar sound that a katana makes whenever it is pulled out is heard and his head goes flying off his body.

"' What the hell are you doing in here' was what you asked this man," a voice said. The lone captain's head rolled across the ground before the sword-carrying assailant picked up the head and examined it like a Christmas present. "To be accurate, Hell is what's coming." The head is dropped to the ground and the assailant moves out of the room to the nuclear launch control room.

* * *

Natasha Romanoff forced her eyes open and slammed down on the alarm clock's snooze button. She groans in grogginess before pulling herself out of bed and doing her morning routine once more. Before she puts on her bulletproof vest, she checks the calendar and sees that it is her day off. She grabs her cell phone and sees a text from her brother. Yelena and Ward were meeting at the National Mall.

"National Mall? Thought it would be somewhere less fancy." She reads another text and it says to wear her uniform. "Looks like I got an excuse." She contemplated putting on her bulletproof vest before deciding to put on her Red Room outfit. She pulls out her leather, military-grade, bluish-black catsuit and pulls on her fingerless gloves. Two leather black belts with an hourglass symbol on the buckle were wrapped around her waist.

She looks at herself in the mirror and smiles at herself, the uniform fitting like a glove. She leaves the apartment, locking up and smiling at her typical neighbors as they came out of their own homes. She stepped down the stairs and made it to the sidewalk in time for her brother to come to pick her up in his car.

"Hey, little brother," she quips to him as she eyes his uniform, "I forgot how serious you looked in your uniform."

Tony says nothing as he slowly turns to stare at her. His attire consisted of his skull mask but he had black goggles over his eyes. As for an outfit, it was concealed underneath a large sweater and he was wearing his hood.

"Surprised you kept your outfit long after," she said to him.

"Ditto," he says back after scanning her outfit, "It looks like your suit still fits you like a glove."

He puts the car into drive and heads off to the National Mall.

**(System Of A Down owns B.Y.O.B, not me. They get the credits.)**

_Everybody's going to the party, have a real good time._

_Dancing in the desert, blowing up the sunshine._

Natasha turns on the music and listens to the rock music playing. Tony then changes the station and plays Russian opera music. She looks up at him with a disapproval look before switching it back to rock music. "How do you not like _B.Y.O.B_?"

"How do _you_ not like Russian music?" he countered back at her as he switches back to the opera music.

Nat rolls her eyes as she answers, "Just because I was born in Russia doesn't mean my favorite songs are limited to Russian songs. And last time I checked, you are technically an American."

Tony shook his head like he was disagreeing with her but explained, "Just because my father - our man-whore of a father - was Russian and my mother was American doesn't mean I like _just_ American music."

They were literal opposites.

Natasha looked at her brother and realized what this was about. "You miss your mother, don't you?"

Tony thinks back to an old memory he gained when he was a child. Before he discovered who his older sister was, Tony lived all by himself with his mother. At the age of four, he had to be the man of the house while his mother worked as a prostitute and the only person to watch over him was the television set (**Note: Tony Masters was born in 1983 so imagine a 1980s television set**). Whenever his mother was gone, he would put on a Russian opera program and just listen to the beautiful music until his mom got home from work. He loved his mother, despite her being a 'whore' because unlike his man-whore of a father, she stuck around to raise him. Even as he watched from the television set, he was able to perfectly copy the opera voice from the TV and he sang it to his mother during her last moments alive on this earth.

"I'm sorry," Natasha apologized after realizing she struck a bad note, "I forgot that you used to listen to Russian opera music when your mother was out working for money."

Tony nodded in appreciation before telling her that it was no sweat and he flips the song back to B.Y.O.B. He was listening to the music and even tapping his hands against the wheel to the beat but Nat reached for the radio system and switched it back to the opera music. Tony looks out her in surprise and although he had a mask on, he smiled and he knew that his sister could see.

"Your mother would be proud of you if she could see you today," she reassured. _Any mother would be proud that their only child became a secret spy/super-assassin._

Tony pulls up to the parking lot for the National Mall just as the Russian opera music ended. Natasha gets out of the car but stops when she realizes that Tony was also getting out of the car dressed in his Grim Reaper outfit. "What the hell are you doing?"

Tony, with one leg touching the street as he half-stands, looks at her and says, "I'm going to join you."

"You can't walk into the National Mall looking like something right out of a horror movie," she scolds like an older sister to a younger brother doing something stupid. "Are you trying to blow our cover?"

Tony shook his head, "They told us to wear our uniforms and I'm pretty sure that nobody would be interested."

Nat's jaw dropped and she smacked her gloved hand into her forehead in an 'are-you-kidding-me' way. "Are you insane; you legit look like the Grim Reaper. Ninety percent of the time, when someone goes into the National Mall with a mask over their face, it's to hide their identity because they're about to do something bad."

"Well," Tony shrugs, "I am not hiding my identity. I'm hiding my disfigured face from young children."

"Get back in the car," she orders her younger twin brother, "Regardless of whatever reason, people are going to be looking at you for wearing a mask in the National Mall and people will start staring in our direction. I'm sure Red Room would not appreciate it if you drew a lot of eyes to us."

"Then what am I supposed to do? Take off my mask? People will still be looking at my disfigured face and I'll probably be traumatizing some children."

"Stay in here," she said, "And I'll send a Red Room Agent to come to chat with you."

Tony groans in annoyance before getting back in the car and closing the door. He huffed in annoyance before turning the car back on and dialing up the A/C unit. He looks at Nat and waves at her, "Go meet with Yelena and tell me all about it when you get back."

"I'll see you." Nat closes the door and walks away, following a large crowd of people.

As Nat follows the large crowd, she gets an encrypted text from Yelena. It was the first text she received from Yelena in years and she had no idea what to say, so she responds:

_N: Where do you want to meet up?_

_Y: Hirshhorn Museum. I'll be wearing an outfit identical to yours._

Nat closes out of the encrypted chat room before heading over to the Hirshhorn Museum, giving Tony a message update on where she was going. She followed a crowd of people walking there and she blended right in, minus her catsuit which caught the eye of a tall man standing behind her. She grinds her teeth together, enraged that someone was staring at her rear end. She was about to turn around and confront the man when she suddenly spotted something up ahead and she instantly forgot about her predicament. She slowly breaks away from the crowd to move closer to the thing that caught her eye. It was someone standing near one of the entrances to the Hirshhorn Museum.

The group took a turn to the right but she and a small number of people from the crowd went up the steps. In the center of the Hirshhorn Museum was a large fountain spewing water and sitting upon the fountain was a woman in a catsuit like herself.

Nat pauses to make sure she was seeing correctly because the person in her identical catsuit was sitting with their back to her. She took note of how wavy blonde hair tied in a ponytail was similar to that of Yelena's and this reassured her that she was the right person.

Nat nears closer to the woman and puts a hand on the woman's shoulder and captures her attention. Yelena Belova turned her head around slowly and looked up at Nat. She stands up to her full height, being taller than Nat by a few inches and more muscular than her. She stares down at Nat with an emotionless face before her lips curve into a smile. "Natasha Romanoff," he says happily.

Nat responds with her smile, "Yelena Belova."

"We Red Room agents got to look after each other." They embrace and Nat discovers via cracking in her backbone that Yelena was a lot stronger than she thought. Nat grunts in pain and winces as she touches her sore back.

"Sorry, sometimes I'm stronger than I even know."

Nat chuckles and detects a smirk growing on Yelena's face. She almost convulses as she feels a sharp pain in her side and checks her abdomen. She puts her hand against the fabric to see if she could feel for any kind of liquid.

"I forgot about your wound that never heals."

Nat told her not to worry about it, "Happens all the time; not like you caused it."

"Yeah…" She quickly changes the subject, "Where's Tony Masters? Your complicated twin brother."

"I left him back in the car, said that it would be too suspicious if we walked in together because he has a mask."

Yelena remembers seeing Tony Masters wearing a mask the last time she saw him and was less than surprised to hear that he was still wearing a mask to shamefully hide his disfigured face. "That's too bad; I was eager to meet up with him today."

"I can take you to him?"

Yelena shook her head, "I can have Agent Grant Ward pick him up; I want to discuss the things that I came here to discuss with you." She sits down on the fountain edge and pats the space beside her. "Take a seat, you'll be much more comfortable."

Nat accepts the offer and sits down next to Yelena. She waits for her to begin while she anticipates what she could say. "Aren't you going to spill what you came here to spill, Yelena?"

"I was wondering if you were aware of what Operation White Widow was."

_Out of all the questions, it had to be that one? _"No, all I know about the operation is that it requires Level 8 clearance and I'm not Level 8."

"It doesn't matter," said Yelena, "The Black Widow has chosen you for this one operation and she is expecting a monumental performance for when the operation is initiated. It looks like all your training in the Red Room will finally pay off."

"You make it sound like the fate of the world might depend on it."

"That's because it might." She looks around, counting how many civilians were inside the museum with the fountain in the center before leaning in to whisper in Nat's ear. "Operation White Widow…" she whispered so softly that Nat could barely hear and she had to pull her in, "Is such a high-level operation, it is practically a miracle that you've been chosen. Just be grateful."

Nat absorbs in the words from her friend as she thinks about what Operation White Widow could be. Maybe it's a high-level assassination or some kind of cover-up for someone very high up in the government. Maybe the US government or an international government. Or...maybe it is just something as simple yet high-profile as hunting down a notorious serial killer that has eluded the public for years.

_This isn't a comic book,_ Nat thinks, _There's no proof that Madame Hydra even exists._

"Can you be more specific?" Nat whispers in the same level voice, "There are all kinds of high-level operations; what makes this one so special."

Yelena pulls away from Nat's ears and looked her in the eyes with an amused smile. Nat's curiosity is at its peak and she tells Yelena to tell her.

"This," she gestures around her, "Is probably not the best environment to be telling something this monumental."

"Then let's go to my car where you can talk to my brother about this as well."

* * *

Tony was sitting in the car, listening to more Russian opera music. He wasn't paying attention to the crowd of people in front of him and turned his head to the left as the passenger door opened and someone sat themselves down in the seat. He didn't have to turn in his skull mask to know who it was.

"Agent Grant Ward," he says like he was tasting every syllable.

"Agent Tony Masters," Grant Ward said in the same tone, "I see you're still wearing masks, even in public."

Tony ignores him. "Where's Yelena and my sister?"

Ward tells him, "They in the Hirshhorn Museum, talking to each other. Your sister said you couldn't walk in public because of your whole…" he gestures to the skull mask, "Outfit."

Tony took no offense and decided to ignore him but Agent Grant Ward was not easy to ignore. It was not so much as Grant Ward talking that was making him difficult to ignore, it was the uncomfortable silence that came along after stopped talking. Tony was suffering from this uncomfortable silence followed by subconsciously drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. He is fed up and decides to talk.

"What is it that you wanted to talk to me about?"

Ward looked at him and smiled, amused that Tony is finally talking to him. "The Black Widow has an opportunity for you and your sister. I don't know if you have heard of it or not, but you two are going to be involved in a Level 8 high-profile mission that others in the Red Room would kill for."

"Really?" Tony rolled his eyes but he was curious as to what kind of mission he was being attracted to, "Level 8 mission?"

"Yep."

"Just spill whatever information you have to say, Ward."

"Whatever you say, Masters." Ward describes what kind of operation it is in full detail. "Level 8, as mentioned before, and you should consider it a miracle that you and your sister have been handpicked for this mission. There are forty _active_ Red Room and only five get to go on such a mission. You, Me, Yelena, and Natasha."

"And who's the fifth person?"

"Did I save five people?"

"Yes."

"The fifth person is the Black Widow."

Tony looks up at him, checking for any physical inconsistencies to make sure Ward wasn't bullshitting him. "Are you being serious? Is the fifth person tagging along really the Black Widow that has eluded our sights for fifteen years?"

"I kid you not," Ward swore, "She is coming with us."

Tony picked up on a keyword: "_She?_" The Black Widow was a female.

_I knew that otherwise, it would've been the Black Widower as a male._ "Is there anything you can tell me about her identity?"

Ward shakes his head, "Not yet, she wants her appearance to be a total surprise for you guys."

"For us? Why us, specifically? She knows us or something?"

Ward nods with a sly smirk on his face, "She knows both of you and has looked over your performance reviews in the last five years in the States."

"Our job was just to report what we did here daily."

"Black Widow has always been watching you," Ward says dramatically, "She knows all about you. Your wife...daughter…"

Tony snaps his head in his direction and stares at him with a fierce look in his eyes. He grabs Ward by the shirt and yanked him towards his face. "Grant...Ward…" their noses were almost touching, "You leave my child out of this! You leave her the fuck out of this or I will blow your head off!"

Ward puts his hands up in surrender and reassures him that no unfair fate will become of his wife and daughter. He looks down at his hand gripping his shirt and politely asked, "Can you let go of me now?"

Tony complied and released his hand from Ward's shirt. "Just leave my family out of it or you will be hurting."

Ward promises, "No unfair fate. They have nothing to do with this and it would be unfair to directly involve them."

"Good," Tony whispered with a hiss, "Because I'll do anything to protect my flesh and blood."

"You should consider yourself lucky then."

"Why?"

Ward explained, "The Black Widow serum."

"What about it: Hurry up and spill your brains."

"The Black Widow serum makes one infertile, male or female. In other words, had the serum accepted you, then you would've been unable to conceive a child. I know, it's bittersweet."

Tony stares at him in shock: He looks away as he reflects on his life, what could've happened if he had not upchucked the tapeworm from the experiments. That meant his beloved daughter never would've been born and he never would've been the father that he is today. It was bittersweet indeed. On one hand: He is not an Hourglass (Male equal of a Black Widow); the one thing he dreamed of becoming. On the other hand: He has a daughter that never would've been born.

Now he was contemplating whether he should go on this operation. If only a select few got to go, then that means only the best of the best got to go because the best of the best are the ones who can fight through the worst of the worst. Man, what to do?

The two doors to the back open simultaneously and two passengers sit in. Tony looks in the rearview mirror and recognizes Natasha sitting behind him and Yelena sitting behind Ward. he studies Yelena in the rearview mirror before smiling under his mask and nodding. "Yelena," he said politely like he always does to women.

"Taskmaster."

That was a button that had been pushed. "I told you not to call me that," Tony scowled after hearing his old nickname. "It's just Tony Masters."

"That's one of the reasons you earned the nickname in the first place."

Nat stepped in and said to Yelena, "Leave my brother alone." She looks ahead and Agent Grant Ward in the passenger seat to her right. "Agent Grant Ward."

Ward responded by saying, "Natalia Ivanovna Romanoff."

Nat groans in disgust in hearing her full name. "'Natalia' is the name of my mother. Call me Romanoff until you've earned the right to call me 'Natasha'."

"Fine then, Romanoff."

Nat was cold towards Ward for a good reason: In the Red Room, he would often try to best her by cheating in the fights. He was second at the top of his class, behind only Yelena but the only way he got there was by throwing illegal punches and kicks to Nat. Despite that they were trained to kill people with one strike, even there are some rules to combat they must follow. In the Red Room, killing your sparring partner is strictly forbidden so he bent the rules and would sometimes injury Nat. She's been training her whole life but he had a lot more experience and he was bested only by Yelena Belova.

Right now, she didn't like Ward. Working with him was out of necessity, and she was finding some reason for him to be 'unnecessary'. She remembered back in the Red Room that her brother had a fierce rivalry with Ward.

Yelena looks at Ward when he looks back at her. She shook her head as a disappointed mother and Ward sank back into his seat. "Leave Nat and her brother alone."

"Sorry, Yelena."

"Is there a plan for what we are doing here?" Tony asks as he puts the car in reverse, "Where am I supposed to drive off to?"

"The airport," Yelena answers, "Take us to the international airport and we'll talk along the way."

Nat points out, "Tony can't go to the airport with his mask on."

Yelena looks at Nat with a smirk like she had a trick up her sleeve. "Don't worry, the Black Widow has already covered it for us."

* * *

_Twenty-Three Years ago in 1993. Russian International Airport._

_Natasha Romanoff, only ten-years-old with shoulder-length red hair, was sitting on a chair, thinking of all the things she could do when she grew up. Whenever her mother questioned, she would always say, 'I want to be the best of the best. I want to have superpowers'. In a way, with all of her martial arts training that she achieved even before she was thirteen, and she was learning about parkour and she was killing it. Her mother had been very supportive of her and she loved her mother very much. She remembers if she isn't studying martial arts or doing parkour/gymnastics, then she was doing one thing: Ballet._

_The whole art of ballet was confusing to her but she told herself that ballet seems like a beautiful sport and that she needs fun. Even when she was just trying o have fun, she still managed to become the top student in her ballet class. She felt bad for making the other kids feel like they weren't the best. But she reminded herself: I want to be the best there is and have superpowers._

_Current time: 19:5, or 7-oh-five pm. Her brother's plane was about to be landing and she was about to meet her little brother for the first time. Her mother took her to the airport where an American airline flew in and Elizabeth Masters, mother of Tony Masters, came to visit her sister. Tony and his mother got off the plane and looked for a cardboard sign with their surname on. Once they found the sign being held by a woman, they followed that woman to meet Natasha Romanoff and Natalia Romanoff._

_The ten-year-old girl walked up to the ten-year-old boy and they both just stood there and stared at each other, unable to find any words for them to say. For the longest time, Nat was told by her mother that she would always be her little princess and that nobody could replace her. She immediately jumped to conclusions when she found out about a brother that was supposed to be born alongside her. She was having mixed feelings: Sad that she wasn't in the spotlight anymore, and happy to have a friend. But one thing that caught her off guard, was his Jason hockey mask._

_Nat went first and held out her hand for Tony to shake. "I'm Nat, your big sister," she said in accented English._

_Tony grabbed his sister's hands and shook it firmly, "Tony," he said, trying to do a Russian accent as well. "Mommy told me so much about you; how do you know so much English?"_

"_Mama is a translator," Nat answered, "How old are you?"_

"_Ten."_

_Nat's eyes brightened up, "I'm ten as well."_

"_But how are we brother and sister though?" Tony questioned, "Mommy said that we're technically half-twins."_

"_Are we fraternal twins?"_

"_No, she says it is more complicated than that." Nat shrugged before she thought of a possible answer. "We both share the same father but different mothers."_

"_So we are half-siblings then," Tony realized, "But how are we twins though? Are we half-fraternal twins?"_

_Nat shrugged again, "I don't know but let's talk about something else." Nat and Tony go to sit down while their mothers talk to each other. Nat spots Tony's mother coughing and becomes concerned. "Is your mother okay?"_

"_She's been feeling sick these last few days but she promises me that she'll be alright."_

_**AN: How little did Tony know that his mother's days were now numbered?**_

"_By the way, what's up with the hockey mask?"_

"_I'm hiding my face."_

"_Why? Are you ugly underneath?"_

_Tony wasn't affected by that question and instead shook his head. "You wouldn't understand why, big sister."_

_Nat and Tony sit down next to each other and just talk about each other. They shared the same birthday, May 10, 1983, same father, Ivan With-No-Last-Name, and even seventy-five percent of the same genes. When they're done talking, Nat asks what Tony wanted to be when he grew up._

"_I want to be a superhero," Tony answered, "Like Captain America or Iron Man. I want to save people. What about you?"_

"_I want to be an assassin," she said proudly, "That's a spy."_

"_Why do you want to be a spy?"_

"_Because I want to be the best of the best."_

"_Why?"_

"_Maye Papa didn't want us because we weren't the best of the best. Maybe he'll come back when we're superstars."_

"_I don't like our Daddy. He should've stuck around to raise." He sighed through the small holes in his mask. "What did you say you wanted to be again?"_

"_An assassin, a spy."_

"_You want to spy on people for a living?"_

"_Don't make it seem like it's that bad."_

"_What if you have to kill people, Nat?"_

"_I'm just going to be spying on bad people and beating them up, I won't kill anybody."_

_**AN: Sure…**_

"_Okay," Tony said with uncertainty, "If you say so, but if you're an assassin and I'm a superhero, we could become enemies."_

_Tony's mother called out to him, prompting Tony to get up. "I guess this is goodbye, for now, Nat."_

"_Where are you going?" Nat asked as she stood up, worried that her brother might be leaving for another ten years. "Are you going back home already?"_

"_No," Tony shook his head, "We're supposed to check into a hotel for the week in a few hours and we want to get a headstart."_

"_You can stay with us," she suggested and wrapped her hands around him to prevent him from leaving, "Your mama can stay with us and we can all live together as a family."_

"_Mommy insisted we check into a hotel for a week but I hope to see you again sister."_

_Nat held back a tear because she didn't want her little brother to see her cry. She hugs him and says, "I'll miss you, little brother."_


	5. T

"Nat!"

Nat is pulled out of her dream/flashback world and into reality and that reality was the runway of an international airport. She looks at the plane standing behind Yelena, the one who snapped her out of her dream world. "What is that?" she nods towards the plane. "Is that military?"

"Of course it is military," Yelena talks down on her like it was obvious...which in a way...it was. "The Black Widow provided it for us. She's on the plane."

She could not believe that she was actually going to meet the Black Widow. She was curious as to what kind of missions the Black Widow goes on, and what kind of superpowers they possessed (if any). That and along with why the parasitic tapeworm that was shoved down their throats worked on her and didn't on her. Either way, she was going to find out once she stepped on the plane.

She and her brother follow Ward and Yelena onto the military plane and Nat looks out one of the circular windows as it takes off. She feels her stomach churning from the turbulence and she has a flashback of the first time she was on a plane. Her stomach did more than make churning sounds and she promised herself never to have a heavy lunch before boarding a plane.

She sits on one of the benches with her brother beside her and she turns to him with a lot of questions on her mind. "Who do you think the Black Widow is? You think it's Melina?"

"Who the hell is Melina?" Tony asked after digging through his memories for a Red Room agent named Melina. "Don't know who that is."

"Okay, what about…" she thought back to her training sessions in the Red Room, no candidates came up. "I can't think of anybody."

Tony taps her stomach to get her attention, "What if it is our father, Ivan Whatever-His-Last-Name-Is? Now that would be a surprising twist."

Nat shook her head again. "Ivan What's-His-Name the Black Widow, why him? Wouldn't he be an Hourglass and not a Black Widow?"

Tony saw the error in his way and nodded after considering what she said. "Touché. But, last time I checked, we're super spies and super assassins. Anybody can fake deaths and identities nowadays. Look at Commissioner Gordon from _The Dark Knight._"

"This is real life Tony, not a...'Tony' winning movie." Nat laughed at her own joke but Tony did not find this funny. Either that, or he misinterpreted what the joke was. She could tell by the look in his eyes that his facial expression was completely emotionless under the mask. "What?"

"I don't get it."

Nat rolls her eyes with an annoyed sigh. "You are so dense. Heath Ledger deserved the award for Best Supporting actor. Nobody's going to perfect the Joker like Heath Ledger did." She paused before saying, "If it is Dad, however, I'm going to punch him. Like this." She throws an uppercut. "I love him enough to punch the teeth out of his mouth."

Yelena came out from the cockpit with Ward behind her. She took a seat next to Nat while Ward stood up.

"Where's the Black Widow?" Nat asks Yelena before eyeing the closed door to the cockpit, "Is she one of the pilots?"

Yelena shook her head and explained. "Only you, me, Tony, Ward, and the Black Widow are on this plane," she promised.

"So…" Nat droned, "She _is_ one of the pilots."

Yelena rolled her eyes as she struggled to answer. She winced as she was in pain before looking up at Ward like she needed permission to say something. She looks back at Nat and gives the best answer she could: "Complicated."

"How is there a complication?"

"Well, the Black Widow wants to be introduced when we fly over the Atlantic ocean. Our destination is Gotska Sandön, in case you were wondering."

"What?" Tony almost shouts in outrage, "That's at least a nine and a half hour flight; what do you expect with us to do in our spare time? And besides, what kind of Level 8 operation requires a ten and a half hour flight from D.C. to Sweden?"

"Tony," Yelena tries to calm him down as if sensing apprehension within him.

"What are we doing? Fighting Nazis from the Second World War?" His voice was rising in anger overhearing the word 'Nazi' leave his mouth. "Last time I checked, the Red Room wiped out the last members of the Fourth Reich uprising."

"You know," Nat holds up a finger, "You have told me and my brother absolutely nothing about Operation White Widow and how are we supposed to know what to do if we don't know what Operation White Widow is in the first place?"

Yelena drums her fingers against her kneecap impatiently but says nothing to answer her question. She looks at Ward with a glare as if he had done something to offend her. But chances are, it were the two siblings who had done the deed. "Help the pilot with whatever he needs."

"Yes ma'am," he says respectfully with a salute before heading over the cockpit.

Yelena looks out the window beside Nat as she contemplates a question for her to ask. They've already been on this plane for about an hour and only eight hours to spare. She curls her fingers into a fist before asking the two Red Room agents, "Do you trust me?" They both said yes. "Do you trust me with your lives?" Same answer. "Do you trust me with your family's lives?" No answer is an answer. "How about this: Do you trust me with the fate of the country of the United States?"

"I would say yes," Tony said, "But it is kind of a difficult decision to make because I have a family in the States."

"Same for me," Nat then says. "If Operation White Widow has anything to do with the fate of the United States…" she pauses in her speech and looks at Yelena with a glare in her eyes, "Do let us know before something _bad_ happens." That one sentence sent chills down Yelena's spine as she cringed and slightly backed away because her senses become heightened sense for any subtle threats. "I have a life back home in the United States and you are stalling me from telling me what Operation White Widow is by coming up with beyond pointless excuses. Believe me when I tell you this, Yelena, you are my best friend, but you better fess up to what Operation White Widow is and how this operation is connected to us and the United States." She let those words seep into her friend's mind as she sinks back into her seat and patiently waited for an answer. Tony's smiled under the mask and it was contagious to Nat.

Yelena cracked the bones in her knuckles as she contemplated her actions. She gets up and heads to the cockpit. She opens the door slightly to whisper to someone inside. She comes back several seconds later and says: "Black Widow has ordered for all details concerning Operation White Widow to be fully disclosed once we are halfway across the Atlantic. You will get your Q&A session in a few hours. Patience my comrades."

"My patience is wearing thin," Nat informs Yelena, switching back to her polite tone rather than her subtle threatening tone.

"And I promise," Yelena sighed, "That your patience will be rewarded." She looks at the cockpit and walks over to the door. Before she steps through, she looks at Nat and Tony and clicks her tongue at them, "I promise." She steps through the door and leaves the two siblings sitting on the bench in the shaky plane.

Nat looked over to her brother for a few seconds before she started speaking, "Operation White Widow must be something extremely important if we have to wait a few hours to be told."

Tony agrees, "Really must be a high-profile case. Any theories to speculate on?"

Nat thought of some and told her theories to her brother: "Information on Area 51, UFO cover-up, the secret to the Bermuda Triangle, proof that Noah's Ark is real...the sky is literally the limit."

"But it has something to do that involves America. Maybe it is something along the lines like us recovering a biochemical weapon from the States or us transporting a radiological weapon from the state."

"So it _has_ to be a weapon of mass destruction?"

Tony cocks his head and speculates what else but he kept coming back to the conclusion most of the time. "Not necessarily but nine out of ten times, it is."

Nat could think of a number of other theories before she lays her back down on the bench with her legs up. She rests her head on top of her right forearm and yawns. She closes her eyes and decides to catch up on the sleep she was deprived of when she woke up earlier. "We still have like eight hours to go, get some sleep, Tony." She licks her lips before settling into a comfortable position and just sits still, listening to the sounds of the airplane engine rattling ad the feeling of weightlessness. She yawns one more time before she drifts off to sleep.

* * *

_Nat dreams of herself in a dark place, feeling like she was as light as a feather and soaring above the clouds. She looks around herself before the sun rises from her left and illuminates a yellow brick road for her. A yellow brick road, like from The Wizard of Oz. She loved that movie as a little girl but she could see that she was standing as an adult in her bluish-black catsuit as she follows the yellow brick road, figuring that was what she was supposed to do. She then spots a dog by her side, Toto the dog of course. But here was the kicker: Toto the dog was actually her niece in a dog form with a human face. Nat laughed hysterically at this before she petted her and kissed her on the cheek. She picked her up and rubbed her head lovingly._

_Her eyes follow the yellow brick road down the street endlessly. She continues pacing down the road nevertheless. She is stopped abruptly when a body suddenly falls down on the ground in front of her as if it was pushed. She jumps back in surprise before seeing the body rise up to its feet and sees her little brother in the form of the outfit the Scarecrow was wearing from the movie. Except, he was wearing his usual Grim Reaper looking mask._

_Nat thought her little brother looked weird dressed up as a scarecrow with his Grim Reaper mask on but she still grabbed him by the hand and they walked together down the yellow brick road. "What do you want from the Great Wizard of Oz?" she asked her little scarecrow brother._

_He answered back by saying, "I would say the brain, but I already have a genetically mutated brain."_

_Nat was a little surprised by her brother's answer but still grabbed him by the hand and they walked together. She ignored his question when he asked, "What do you want from the Great Wizard of Oz." It was vague, but she swore she heard her brother singing, 'If I Only Had A Brain That Wasn't Genetically Mutated Within Me'. When her brother noticed her daughter in a dog form, he cheered happily._

_She came across the Tin-Man like planned and the Tin-Man was nevertheless Mercedes Merced, who fell right on the path in front of them like she was pushed. Nat instantly recognized her and asked what she wanted._

_Mercedes, or Tin-WoMan, answered, "I already have a heart because I am in love with your brother."_

_Nat turns and sees her supposed little brother in the form of a fully matured man. She looks shocked but accepts this as something that happens in dreams. But then Mercedes kisses Tony the Scarecrow on the lips of his skull mask and Nat is confused. Obviously, this is not what was supposed to happen in the movie. Then Mercedes Tin-WoMan spotted her daughter in dog form and cheered happily like Tony the Scarecrow._

"_What do you want?" asked Mercedes Tin-WoMan._

_Like Nat's previous answer to Tony the Scarecrow, she just ignored him._

_And right on cue, here came the Cowardly Lion. Only this time, it was an actual lion. Nat punches the lion and it falls to the ground before morphing into a human-shaped form. The Cowardly Lion gets up and is revealed to be Yelena Belova. Nat laughed at the thought of Yelena Belova being the cowardly lion before asking the same question she asked Tony the Scarecrow and Mercedes Tin-WoMan: "What do you want from the Great Wizard of Oz?"_

"_I am supposed to say courage but I have more than enough courage to die for the Red Room," she answered proudly, "What do you want from the Great Wizard of Oz?"_

_Nat ignored her and all four of them walked away._

_They followed the yellow brick road the rest of the way but instead of getting to the city of Oz, they ended up right back to the Russian nuclear launch base from earlier. There were dead Russian soldiers on the ground and the four of them stepped over each body before going through a door that the yellow brick road leads them to. Inside the room, fire surrounded the walls and there was a cloud of green smoke ahead of them. Nat froze from walking before halting the others and looking like a floating green face the size of a bell for a belltower. "So," Nat drones, "You're Oz the Great and Powerful."_

"_I am the Black Widow," the green face says. So instead of Oz the Great and Powerful, it was the Black Widow she was talking to. She didn't know what the Black Widow looked like in real life, so she was just picturing Madame B.'s face. "Who are you?"_

"_Well," Nat steps up nonchalantly, "I'm Natasha Romanoff, Red Room agent, and I've come to figure out what Operation White Widow is."_

"_Shut up!" The Black Widow roars at her and slightly starts Nat. She rushes back in compliance. "Jeez la freaking weez."_

_She watched the next few minutes of her experience play out in front of her. Like in the movie, the Tin-WoMan was called up so Mercedes walked slowly up to the Black Widow. Mercedes the Tin-Woman's desire was to have Tony's, the father of her daughter, heart. Nat could only guess by 'heart', she meant Tony's love._

_She was silenced by the Black Widow though. Tony the Scarecrow was called up and he desires to have a normal face like everybody else because he was disfigured. And when Yelena the Cowardly Lion was called up, she showed fearlessness talking to the leader, saying she wanted to be the next Black Widow._

_The green-faced Black Widow tells them to do one small task: Complete Operation White Widow and their dreams will come true. Nat's dream was actually to become the next Black Widow, not learn about Operation White Widow. But now that she has to learn about Operation White Widow, that was her goal to complete to become the next Black Widow._

_The four of them walk away but as they walk out the door they came through, Yelena the Cowardly Lion puts her right hand on Nat's back and her left hand on Tony the Scarecrow's. With a great deal of strength, she shoves both of them forward and through the front door. They tumble down a mountain of snow at full speed, they would be going beyond the speed limit of twenty-five miles per hour. When their tumble down the hill came to an abrupt stop, Nat fell right onto rebar while Tony's face was torn on. Nat yells in agonizing pain and thinks back to her she has stitches and how she can feel the blood gushing out of her wound. _

* * *

Nat yelps in pain as she clutches her side like she was stabbed there again. She convulses in pain before turning over on her side with her head hanging inches over the edge of the bench. "Shit," she cursed upon waking from her dream, "What the hell was that?"

"What was that indeed," Tony mocked her as he slapped her lightly on the face to wake her up. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her into a sitting position. "You have been asleep for hours and you kept moving around like someone was strangling you or something."

Nat feels her wound for any wet blood and was relieved to find none. She looks at the window and sees the sun going down. She looks at her watch and sees that she has been asleep for eight and a half out of nine hours. It was already two in the afternoon and they land in Gotska Sandön in less than fifteen minutes. "I can't believe the fucking dream I had." She turns to her brother and explains her _Wizard of Oz'_s dream and he looked at her intently when she said that he was in there. He smiled under his mask, liking the idea. "Did Yelena tell you what Operation White Widow was?" She remembers what the green-faced Black Widow told her in her dreams and how Yelena betrayed her by pushing her down a hill and getting impaled with rebar.

"I've been waiting for you to wake up," Yelena said as she exited from the cockpit, obviously she waited for the right opportunity to reveal herself. "You want to know what Operation White Widow is, I'm about to tell you."

"Finally," Nat says as she wakes the rest of her body up. "What is Operation White Widow and who is the Black Widow."

Ward emerged from the cockpit and stood behind Yelena as they both towered over Nat and Tony with their arms crossed.

Yelena looked over behind Ward for some kind of reassurance before turning her eyes back on Nat. "I'll stop stalling and tell you what Operation White Widow is."

"Then get on with it," Nat and Tony both urged impatiently.

Yelena contemplates her wordings before sighing heavily and closing her eyes. "Operation White Widow involves nuclear warfare."

Nat and Tony's neutral facial expressions devolve down to ones of pure horror. The second nuclear warfare bounced off of Yelena's lips and into the air, it felt like their world shattered. They both knew the last time they dealt with nuclear warfare ended badly for them. Tony's face was permanently ripped off and Nat was never going to wear bathing suits again. They assumed the worst but decided for Yelena to elaborate.

"What does the United States have to do with Operation White Widow?" asked Natasha.

Yelena didn't hesitate to explain but she went into a detailed background. "I don't know if you are aware of this or not but the United States and Russia are not doing so well. I'm sure you've read in the papers that the economic war between the US and Russia is extremely high and the most talked-about incident since the fall of the Soviet Union."

"What are you getting at, Yelena?"

"What I'm trying to say," she suppresses the frustration and impatience within her voice, "Is that this has always been inevitable. This has been a day coming for a very long time."

"And what day would that be."

Yelena exhales a breath of air. "The day the United States of America becomes nothing more than a pariah state."

Nat doesn't say anything for several more seconds before finally saying, "How are you planning on turning the United States into a pariah state?"

Yelena looks at Ward and nods silently. Ward heads back into the cockpit to pull out a newspaper and tosses it into Nat's lap. She reads the headline: **US LOSES NUCLEAR SUB IN THE NORTH SEA.** After Yelena reads the headline, she looks up at Yelena and tells her observation, "You stole a nuclear submarine in Europe, American origin."

"Correct," Yelena praised, "Someone give Natasha Romanoff a trophy."

"What is this all about?" Nat's voice rises as well as she does off the bench.

Yelena looks past Nat to see Tony glaring at her through the eyeholes in his skull mask. She holds her hands up in surrender before explaining herself. "Let me explain in a clearer way." She stands up and faces Nat in the eye, "The United States of America is too powerful of a country to exist on its own."

Nat pays attention to every word.

"There can never be a balance in this world because of all the power that the United States holds. Even Russia is distrustful because of the US's power. Operation White Widow is about restoring balance to the world by taking the States' power away."

"So you're going to nuke America? Is that what Operation White Widow is about."

"You son of a bitch!" Tony stands and grabs Yelena by her collar. "I have a family back home!" he shouts in her face, their noses just inches apart. "You fucking psychopath! I should just murder you right now!"

Ward kicks Tony in the face and shoves him away like he was pushing open a rotating door.

"Don't worry, Masters," Yelena reassures after straightening out her collars, "The United States is not the target for the nukes. We prefer a more passive-aggressive approach."

"And what would that be?" questioned Natasha as she stalked over Yelena's side. "Framing the United States?" She watches Yelena's facial expression become neutral and realized that her suspicions were correct. "Those _are_ your plans. You're going to frame America for an undeclared act of nuclear war." She grabs Yelena by the throat. "You could destroy the whole planet."

Yelena kicks Nat in the groin area and flips her over her hip and puts her in a headlock with her legs. "Don't be dramatic, Nat. America is not just going for an undeclared act of nuclear war, just to be kicked out of the United Nations."

Natasha coughs and slips out from between her knees and rolls back to where she was sitting earlier. She was still confused by Yelena's answer before she realized something and picked up the newspaper on the ground. She reads more of the article and discovers a new detail. "There are five permanent members of the United Nations and there are four nukes in this submarine." She looks at Yelena as she continues, "You're going to launch a nuke to all countries that are permanent members of the United Nations save for America." She pauses. "That's how you're going to expel the US from the United Nations; by framing them for betraying the world."

Yelena claps slowly but retains an emotionless expression on her face as she stares down at Nat, regarding her with amusement nonchalantly. "Good job, Nat. Good job. That was the goal all along and I'm proud that you figured it out on your own."

"What's going to happen when the United States is branded as a pariah state?" Tony asked worriedly as he picked himself off the ground.

Nat could tell that Tony was thinking of the safety of his family. His wife and daughter were her family as well and she did everything she could to keep the rage from boiling up inside. "It'll be isolated from other countries, left vulnerable from invasions. Basically, the country will be an outcast with no friends to help."

"Go on," Yelena urged eagerly for Nat to continue.

"But even if you were to destabilize America, it is still a rich country. And I know how much you like to think ahead so chances are you'll destabilize the economy as well. Then the military, the government, then destabilize the country from the inside out."

"That is the whole point of Operation White Widow," Yelena cheers happily at Nat like she got a trivia answer correct and one million dollars. "Destabilizing the power that the United States holds." She winks at Nat with a click of her tongue. "You should consider yourself lucky you are on this mission."

"This is not a mission, this is terrorism," Nat spoke up as she faced Yelena, "Tony and I have a life in the United States. A job, family, friends, everything that a normal person is supposed to have. America has done nothing wrong and it is going to be branded a pariah state just because of some fear over too much power?"

"To be honest," Yelena held up her hands, "It is both business and personal."

Now Nat realized that since this was a personal mission, then Yelena was unable to be talked out of this. "Why?"

"Remember a long time ago when I said that my father died when Chernobyl became a wasteland?"

"Yeah."

"My father was an agent for the US government. He was sent on a mission in Chernobyl and once he completed it, he was left behind to die when the reactors fell apart and turned Chernobyl into No Man's Land." There was a slight change of tone in the way she spoke. She looked off to the side as she replayed the memories in her head, her smile vanishing and replaced with a face that expressed sadness. "My father was abandoned by the people he worked for and he died a slow and painful death." She slowly rubbed her fingers together and closes her eyes, a tear managing to escape through her eyelids. "I remember every feeling that day. I had to wear a Hazmat suit just to talk to him during his last moments alive on this earth. He held my hand as his life slowly expired and I remember sobbing in tears." She licks her lips and sighs before looking at Nat. "He made me promise that I would avenge him when I got older. I would avenge him and I would destabilize the country that he used to work for." And suddenly, just like that, her sad facial expression vanished and back to her emotionless one. "And that's what I intend to do. My father was never granted mercy so why should I grant mercy to those who left him to die?"

"You can't let your feelings get the better of you," Nat tried to persuade. She could not believe that Yelena was crying. In all the time that she knew of Yelena, she has never seen her cry before. She was always such a socially-awkward stoic person but now she knows that she has layers and one of them is Daddy issues. "I'm going to talk about this Black Widow right now see if we can work something out."

"WAIT!" Yelena calls but Nat has already opened the door. She didn't need to see her facial expression to know what Nat was thinking.

Nobody was inside the cockpit; it was on autopilot. There were no signs of anybody on this plane other than the four of them. This entire trip, she's been told that the Black Widow was flying the airplane. It took her only a few seconds to realize the obvious.

Nat slowly turned her head around and her eyes stare into the wide brown eyes of Yelena Belova, her lips pulling back to form a soft growl. "You...are...Black Widow."

Yelena tried to act innocent, pretending like she didn't know what she was talking about, but she gave up almost immediately and told Nat that she was right. "Well, at least I didn't kill my husband during mating." She laughed.

It was like her dream had come true. The Cowardly Lion - Yelena - pushed her and her brother down a hill and she got stabbed and Tony's face was torn off. That brought back a flashback to the real event five years ago and it doesn't take Nat long to connect the dots. "You told those soldiers we were coming...that's how they were able to ambush us." She narrows her eyes with hate and if looks could kill…"You set me and Tony up; you stabbed me in the appendix and tore Tony's face off."

"It was part of an initiation," she defended herself, "I have been planning something this big for five years, even before your little incident that disfigured you two. It was part of an initiation, recruitment. I wanted to see if you guys knew what you were doing."

"So you sold us out just for a test?"

"I knew you would kill the soldiers and make it to the nuclear launch room to see the true coordinates to where the nuke was going. Whatever happened afterward, I left it in your hands and sadly, you chose to save America."

"You said that 'Black Widow' assigned us to work undercover in America. You were just using us as a deep cover operation to spy on America and infiltrate its structure."

"I can't believe you and your brother are SWAT. You deserve to be a 'Lady In Red' rather than a 'Boy in Blue'." She smirked at the subtle derogatory behind her sentence.

"How long have you been Black Widow?" she demanded as she walked up to Yelena and shoved her against the wall. "How long?!"

Ward grabbed Nat's shoulder but Tony punched Ward in the stomach before wrestling him to the ground.

"Ignore them," Nat gestured to Tony and Ward, "Keep your eyes on me and tell me what the secret is behind the Black Widow program."

"You're probably not going to like what you hear."

"Try me." Nat puts her forearm under Yelena's jaw and kept it there until she heard what Yelena had to say.

"The Black Widow is not a specific person," she explained with heavy sighs, "The Black Widow is an idea, a philosophy."

"Mind explaining what the philosophy is?"

"The philosophy is that anybody can be the Black Widow. The Black Widow is just an agent in the Red Room who is willing to do what is necessary for the greater good. For Russia and the world itself. I have proved that to the Red Room's judges and they awarded me the honor of becoming the Black Widow. No superpowers or anything."

A familiar taste of metal came back to Nat's tongue as she thought of the parasite shoved down her throat. "So that whole 'Shoving-a-tapeworm-down-the-throat' was a bunch of bullshit?"

"It was actually used to weed out the weak ones. The results were always going to end in failure anyways. It was used to see which Red Room agents were strong and weak if they were robbed of the Black Widow opportunity. It was tasty I will admit." Yelena smacked her tongue against her lips. "Now you get to be the one thing that you always dreamed of, Nat: The Black Widow and all you have to do to earn the title is help me complete this task of blowing the United Nations sky high and framing the United States for it. Nobody's going to hate you for it...except America but you're Lady in Red, not a Boy in blue."

"No! I will kill people if I'm ordered to, but mass murder for something so ridiculous and mundane..." she slowly shook her head, "I would never kill innocent people."

Yelena's sad facial expression flashed into an angered one for a brief second, long enough for Nat to see the truth. "So, it looks like I'll be spinning the web myself."

Yelena Belova wasn't doing what was necessary, she was just a monster.

A monster.


	6. M

**AN: Warning, mentions of real-life incidents where lots of people died.**

"I'm not going to let you go through with this," Nat declares to the traitor, "I'm not going to let you kill innocent people and I'm not going to let you turn America into No Man's Land."

Yelena knees Nat in the stomach before shoving her off. Nat clutches her stomach in pain, fearing that her stitches may have ripped once more. Yelena doesn't even give a chance to react before he kicks her across the face with a spinning roundhouse kick. Nat falls to the ground but kips up and lunges for Yelena.

Yelena grabs Nat and flips her. Nat falls on her side but kicks Yelena in the face and gets back up. She throws a punch at Yelena but the stronger, more experienced woman caught it and held her fist in place with little to no effort. She clutches Nat by the throat and squeezes with all her might to exhaust her opponent. "I was trained in the Red Room since birth; you merely adopted the Red Room when you turned eighteen."

"Must be why I'm not a sociopath." She kicks Yelena in the groin area, but her opponent reacted as if nothing happened.

"I don't think so," Yelena declares before punching Natasha hard in the nose and disorients her. "I'm better than you, Nat." She punches Nat in the stomach before connecting her knuckles to her temple. "You are standing for America and anybody who stands for America is by definition, our enemy." She kicks Nat in the jaw. "So, I'm sorry to say this, Romanoff, but if you are fighting for America…" She puts Nat in a chokehold, "Then that makes your _my_ enemy."

Nat breaks out of the chokehold and trips Yelena onto her back. She climbs on top and starts pounding her fist into her face with barely any time between punches. The Black Widow's nose starts to bleed yet she doesn't fight back. Nat is insulted and grabs Yelena's head and hammers it into the ground.

Yelena punches Nat in the face before grabbing her by the head and gouging a finger into her left eye. Nat yells in pain before she pushes herself off of Yelena to save her eyes. She could feel her heart beating in her eye but no permanent damage aside from temporary half-blindness.

"Fighting for something personal," Yelena droned like an instructor to a student, "Is a weakness that Red Room will not tolerate."

"_You_ are fighting for something personal."

"I'm above the Red Room and have earned the right to get personal with my missions." She dodges a punch and punches Nat across the face. "I thought we were sisters-in-arms. You were supposed to be my best friend."

Ward pushed Tony off of him and they fought. He pulls out a knife and waves it in front of him. He knew Tony's secret and why he earned the nickname he disliked so much so he was going to stay on the complete defense and would never throw a punch unless he caught Tony off guard.

"Let's not do this," Yelena tried to persuade Nat as she threw a missed punch to her face, "Red Room is willing to forgive. I mean, my way of showing you forgiveness is stringing you up by your feet and suckling the organs out of your stomach. Like how a Black Widow is supposed to do." Yelena punches Nat back and causes her to trip and fall to the ground. "And just to clarify, I'm _not_ a cannibal." Nat was already wrapped in a chokehold by Yelena before she could even comprehend what happened. Her face blushes from a lack of oxygen. Yelena smells Nat's red hair and inhales the scent. "I envy your red hair in contrast to my blonde hair. I think I'll wear your hair as a wig. What do you say?"

Nat hit Yelena in the nose and caused her to grunt in pain. "You think that agents in the Red Room are superheroes, 'best friend forever'?" she mocked as she squeezed tighter before falling on the floor with Nat below her.

She jams her knee into Nat's back and paralyzed her. "Red Room was created to eliminate the larger power." She emphasizes her point by almost snapping Nat's neck but decides to spare her so she could continue monologuing. "The Red Room takes credit for historical events like the Red Terror, the February 28th Incident, the Great Chinese Famine, burning Texas City down to the ground." She softens her grip so Nat could get a breath of air before she continues, "Any kind of political opposition against balance, Red Room is there to clean up the mess that the world makes. Operation White Widow is Red Room at its finest and no rogue agent with daddy issues and a fierce determination will stand in our way." She lets go of Nat's neck before she blacked out and let the young girl cough it out before she placed her foot on her chest. "I will reopen your wound again if you even tempt me."

Nat kicks Yelena's foot off of her chest before sitting up and glaring at Yelena with a look that could've killed her if looks could kill. "I will be standing right between you and the people of the United States."

Tony copied all of Ward's moves when he forced him to attack. He was able to dodge nearly all of his attacks, but he was getting tired and realized that Ward was only wearing him out. He mentally slapped himself for being stupid enough to fall for his tricks. He fights back against Ward but Ward has the upper hand this time and flips Tony over his shoulder and onto the ground. Before he could get a chance to get up, Ward piledrives onto Tony's stomach.

Yelena shoves the heel of her boot against Nat's neck. Nat fights back and slaps the boot away but she still received a kick to the face and fell on her side. "You are such a disappointment." She tugs Nat on the hair and throws her to the side. "Get up and fight me like you always dreamed a Black Widow agent could."

And Nat pulled herself to her feet and gave Yelena everything she could.

Nat throws a roundhouse kick, Yelena dodges and kicks Nat in the leg. Yelena grabs her by the hair and hammers her against the circular window. Nat breaks free and elbows Yelena in the stomach. Yelena roars in anger and headbutts Nat before picking her up over her head with both hands. "I'm going to break your spine."

Nat elbows Yelena in the scalp and falls to the ground. She does a Taekwondo sweep to Yelena. She falls on her back but kips up and front kicks Nat in the chest.

"What's your motive?" Tony asked as he raised his fighting hands in front of Ward. "Yelena's got a pretty sympathetic motive, what's your motive?"

Ward doesn't hesitate to answer and says: "She's my best friend, can't let her down. Plus, I'm the Hourglass."

Tony recalls as many fight scenes from movies as he possibly could but realizes that it has been a while since he watched some movies. Ever since his daughter came into the world, he had been keeping the fighting down to a minimum so he wouldn't lose any personal memories of her. But now it came at a cost as he couldn't remember any fighting style from a movie he saw. He remembers Nat's fighting style but only the basic punches and kicks. He realized that he was just a regular person up against someone who's been trained to be an assassin since birth. Grant Ward didn't become an Hourglass just by doing anything. He knew Tony's modus operandi and was using it against him. Ward was doing the defense and Tony the offense, which is why he was unable to copy any of his moves. He would let himself take a beating but Ward was too smart for that.

Nat tripped Yelena down to the ground and stomped on her elbow, snapping her bone slightly out of place. Yelena clutches her broken arm and cries in pain before her cries evolved into laughter and she snapped her bone right back into place like they do in the movies.

"You gotta be kidding me," Nat shook her head.

Yelena draws a gun on Nat and they do the same. They disarm each other at the same time but draw a spare gun. Nat kicks her gun away and Yelena does the same. Nat grapples Yelena by the waist but Yelena grabs Nat by the waist and hauls over her shoulder. Nat falls on her back and before she could get up, Yelena grips her hair and almost pulled it out of her scalp. She hammers Nat's forehead into her knee and caused her to fall on her back. She kicks Nat while she still down particularly in the groin area. "Looks like someone's not having kids."

"Yeah, you!" Nat kicks Yelena in the groin area once more and it hurts this time. Nat climbs to her feet but once she gets up to one knee, Yelena kicks the knee away and causes her to fall forward. Yelena drives her knee bone forward and hits Nat in the side of the temple, hitting her square in the temporal artery and giving her a concussion.

Nat lays on her back as her world spins like a ceiling fan. Yelena stands above her and kneels.

"You're so weak."

Yelena kicks the downed Nat four times as hard as she could in the stomach and side, causing Nat to groan in pain.

Yelena sighed in exhaustion before holding up her bloody hand and admiring the blood on her knuckles. She smiles with pride before licking the blood clean off. "Taste like victory." She kicks Nat one more time up the jaw before walking away and back to the cockpit. She stops only a few feet away to watch Ward overpower Tony. "Good job, Ward."

Yelena heads to the cockpit to check the schedule. Five minutes away from the international airport. "Good timing," she praised herself. She licks another ounce of blood off her knuckles before she speaks to Nat without even bothering to look back.

Yelena pulls a strand of hair out of the dizzy Nat's face softly as a lover would. "You're so beautiful, you know that? Back when I was in the Red Room, I had a massive crush on you and I wanted to be everything for you. I considered telling you that I passed but I was too afraid." She grips Nat by the throat with rage. "But you betrayed me by standing for America." She removes her hands away and walks back to the cockpit.

"You want to know why I waited so long to tell you, Nat? So by the time I told, we would already be halfway across the over with no point of return. I also figured that it would be the best time to tell you that I had feelings for you. You just had to ruin it, didn't you?" She takes out her cell phone and looked up information on the sub they stole. "The nuclear sub was commandeered is on the island this plane is heading towards and I've already got an army of former Soviet Union soldiers who were more than happy to bring the United States down to their feet." She opens her mouth to continue but she is speechless when her keen ears pick up a familiar sound: A bullet loaded into a gun chamber.

_The guns, _Yelena mutters a curse under her breath before ducking down and listens to the sound of a gunshot piercing her sensitive ears. She screams in pain yet fails to notice what was hit in the cockpit: The controls. She looks up at the red needles in the gauges spinning out of control and the plane going down.

Yelena flies into the ceiling like she was in space as the plane goes down and hits her head hard enough to make her bleed.

Ward and Tony floated up to the ceiling and slammed into each other like trains colliding.

Natasha grabbed the bench and held on. Her backup gun slips out of her fingers and she dangles up as she hangs on for dear life.

The military takes a plunge down towards the ground and heads towards the Berlin Cathedral with the tail and wings dislodging upon impact.

Yelena grabs one of the wheels and diverts the plane up. The plane's nose ascends a few angles and manages to crash on its body instead of its nose. The plane slides across the ground, the innocent civilians moving out of the way in time as the plane plunges through walls and fences like they weren't even there.

Ward and Tony fall to the ground and slide forward. Nat lands right on her side, the wound with one, and screams in agony. In the cockpit, Yelena's face smashed against the console and she yells as her face connects to the wheel with no airbag deploying.

The military plane slows to a stop, the tip of the nose tapping against the Berlin Cathedral.

Inside the plane, nobody was conscious. They all either passed out from the pain or cause they hit something hard enough to put them down.

Nat woke up with blood-soaked on the side of her catsuit. She moves a hand to cover her wound and sits up. Her gun is gone and the pain slowly fades away.

* * *

It wasn't every day that Bruce Banner (**Mark Ruffalo**) put himself on the line for someone else. Actually...it was because he has a little problem with anger issues and the name of this problem starts with the letter H. As history has proven before, he can't go on vacation without getting involved with saving somebody's life. He rushes to the downed airplane and crawls in through the hole torn in the back. He looks inside and sees three people lying on the ground and another knocked out in the cockpit. He runs over to Natasha and checks on the wounded woman.

"Are you okay, ma'am?" Bruce asks as his eyes draw to the blood on her catsuit. "What happened?" He looks up at Natasha Romanoff and the world froze for a second. He forgot what he was going to say and just gazed into Nat's eyes. Her lips were mouthing words but he could not hear what she was saying. When he realized this, he snapped himself out of his trance and asks her to repeat what she said.

"This wound, I've had for five years." She points to the girl in the cockpit. "It was a complete accident this plane crashed but I'm glad it did."

"It's alright," Bruce reassured.

"I'm glad it did," she repeated.

Bruce did not understand what she meant by it and he picked her up bridal style and carried her out of the plane. Nat knew that she could walk but for some reason, she found herself intrigued by this man who doesn't even know her name, saving her. He was just a regular person saving someone he didn't know from the plane wreckage. It was like she was seeing herself in the mirror, except the 'mirror' carrying her to safety was handsome. Naturally beautiful. "I'm Natasha Romanoff, by the way," she introduced.

"Bruce Banner" he replied as he took her outside the plane and gently set her on the concrete ground next to a wall. He checks her for any more injuries and sees cuts and bruises on her face. _What,_ he thought. He looks down at her suit and realizes that she is wearing a catsuit, the same that most overseas government agents from Russia wear. _Of course, she is Russian with that last name._

"My brother is still in there," Nat points, "He's the one in the skull mask."

Without even hesitating, Bruce runs back inside to save Tony.

He runs inside and grabs the unconscious Tony by the legs. He drags him away from the other unconscious agent before picking up the heavy man and carrying him over his shoulder. He takes him outside and lays him right next to Nat. He is not obvious to the skull mask on but he ignores it. He goes back to grab the others but Nat told him not too because they deserve the fate they get. Bruce cast a suspicion glare at the naturally beautiful woman before he got down to one knee to start patching up their wounds.

"What are you guys up to?" Bruce asks as he tells Nat to unzip her catsuit down enough to examine her bloody wound. Neither of the twins' answers as Bruce starts working on patching up Nat's wound, putting the stitches back in their places.

"Complicated," Nat simply answers, "You probably wouldn't understand it anyway." She then took note of how Bruce Banner spoke English with no hint of a German accent within him. Maybe he could understand. "The less you know, the better."

"I'll take your word for it," Bruce responds and he wrapped a bandage around her side. "Good as new."

"Thanks for your help, Bruce," she said gratefully, remembering what his first name was. "I need to make sure those two guys inside the plane are dead before something bad happens."

Yelena snaps out of unconsciousness and growls in anger as she touches a tear of blood dripping down her cheek. She hisses like an angry predator before turning around to see the gun that Nat dropped on the floor. She crawls over to the gun, grabs it firmly by the grip, and raises it Nat's head, whom she spotted outside the plane wreckage. "Daughter of a man-whore."

Bruce spots a gun being raised in the corner of his eye from inside the wreckage. His eyes widen as he realizes that it was being pointed at this naturally beautiful woman. Without even thinking, he wraps his arms around Nat and they both fall to the ground, but not after a gunshot went off.

Bruce screams in agony as he feels a bullet rips through the flesh in his shoulder and he cries in agony. Nat landed on her side just as she realized that Bruce took a bullet for her and glared at Yelena in the plane.

She remembers losing the gun inside the plane and realizes that Bruce was shot with her gun. Before she could do anything, she saw Bruce's eyes peeled open as wide as they could and she looked into his eyes, which were now glowing green. She was confused, then amazed out how green they were. Then she started feeling terror upon hearing a soft growl come from Bruce's mouth and the growl didn't even remotely sound human.

Yelena kicks Ward to consciousness and urges him to get out of the plane. The two Red Room Agents climb out of the plane and Yelena aims her gun at Nat and Tony, who were too startled by what was happening to Bruce to even acknowledge them.

"Bruce?" Nat whisperers.

Bruce's face slowly turns a shade of dark green and Nat backs away.

Tony starts hyperventilating in his mask and slowly crawls alongside the wall.

"How could you take a bullet for that whore?!" Yelena and Ward walk up to Bruce and they both grabbed him by the shoulders. With a burst of strength, Bruce shoves Yelena in Ward and they go both flying back about twenty feet and land hard on their backs.

Bruce positions himself on his knees and knuckles, looking at Nat before back at Yelena and Ward. The entirety of his skin throughout his entire body turned a dark green color and his growls became more inhuman as the seconds passed.

Nat and Tony backed as far back as they could from the Bruce, whose shirt was now beginning to rip.

Bruce's blue shirt sweater expanded as well as his body. He grew in size and muscles ripped through the sleeves of his shirt. As he stands up to a height of nine feet, he raises his hands above his head and smashes them down in the ground just as he completes his transformation.

Yelena and Ward try to make a run for it. The fists that smashed in the ground caused a ripple effect that made its way towards Yelena and Ward. The powerful vibrations in the ground knocked the two off their feet. Yelena fell on top of Ward but she quickly aimed the pistol at Hulk and fired every bullet in the magazine, only to find bullets to be redundant. "Oh my god," the two said in unison.

Hulk, standing in nothing but a ripped pair of his blue jeans, breathes heavily, his muscled chest rising and falling at a steady pace. He takes a few steps towards the downed agents, who took off running. Hulk chased them down in less than a second and jumped right in front of their path from above.

The two agents fall to the ground before running in the opposite direction after getting up. Hulk did the same thing but they went around him this time. They ran towards one of the brick fences and climbed up. Hulk casually walked over to the wall that they were climbing and with one hand, smashed the entirety of the wall, crumbling it into pieces and causing the agents to fall over the ground as well.

The two agents still took off and ran into the streets, where police cars suddenly pulled up in front of Yelena and Ward and drew their guns on Hulk and instantly fired. The two Red Room agents made it out of the firing path in time and ran off for good this time without Hulk pursuing.

The gunfire was pissing off Hulk with withe bullets bouncing off his skin and annoying the living crap out of him.

More police cars pulled up and heavier guns then pistols were drawn and almost every round present in the firearm of twenty or thirty plus police officers went firing right at Hulk.

Hulk roared in anger and lunged for the police cars. The officers thankfully got out of the way in time but Hulk picked up a police cruiser and split in half and used the two halves to smash them into the cars. Hulk jumps around the place, smashing whatever building was in his path and officers were forced to drive out of there once they realized that the situation was more than they could handle. Before backup could be called in, the angry green man leaped into the air and soared miles away from the Berlin Cathedral, disappearing from sight before he even returned to the earth.

Nat was shell-shocked upon what she just witnessed. An innocent bystander took a bullet for her and transformed into some kind of green monster with massive strength. He transformed right in front of her and almost squashed like a bug.

After the whole incident with the green monster, Nat and Tony were sitting in the back of ambulances with blankets wrapped around them. Her stitches remained intact this time and Nat was still thinking over the horrifying transformation that occurred in front of her. How could something that furious happen to someone that altruistic? Aside from that, a cleanup crew was sent in to clean up the mess that Bruce left behind. One officer came by and offered to get anything for the two siblings. Neither one asked for anything so the officer left them to be in the ambulance.

"Well," Tony paused, "At least our vacation days won't go to waste." Tony tried to lighten the mood but he could tell by her facial expressions that she was in no mood for jokes. "You okay?" He recognized that she was still traumatized and waved his hand in front of her face to try and grab her attention. "Nat?"

"Where could Yelena and Grant be going?" she suddenly asks her brother without turning her head, "They don't know what they're doing."

"I'll tell you what they are doing." Tony throws the blanket off of his shoulders, "Trying to start World War Three so World War Four can be fought with sticks and stones."

He and Nat climb out of the ambulance and turn away from the plane wreckage. Nat quickly checks to make sure that she has her three guns before remembering: "Yelena stole my gun. I'm going to steal it back as soon as I find the skinny bitch."

"Don't need a gun; hand-to-hand combat is my style, but we need some transportation."

As fate would have it, a four by four jeep pulled up to the scene and a reporter speaking in German spoke to her cameraman. The reporter and cameraman moved over to question the officer in charge and the two siblings acted nonchalantly as they hopped into the vehicle, with Nat hotwiring the jeep and drive off as fast as she could.

"We just stole a jeep in front of everybody," Tony sighs, "We must have some pretty big balls to do that in front of the police."

"They'll forgive us," Nat shrugged, "Once we save them from World War Three." Nat constantly checked the rearview mirrors to make sure no cars were behind. "We're gonna have to cross the bridge up ahead. Tony, where could Yelena and Grant have gone?"

"The only place I can think of is some kind of command center on Gotska Sandön. If they took over a nuclear sub in the North Sea then they probably would've docked it nearby. Either that or the nuclear submarine is still in the ocean but the command center is on Gotska Sandön."

"Either way, that means we have to get on an island. We have a jeep so we should start driving to the nearest marina."

"Already on it." Tony pulled out his phone and started digging through all the information he could find on the web. "Also to point out, Gotska Sandön is 745 km away. That means the island is four hundred and sixty-two miles away. We're going to either need a boat or a plane. I vote on a plane.

Nat pulls up into a long line of traffic backed up due to the airplane crashing. She quickly examines her options and turns the jeep down an alleyway and speeds as fast as she could to the other side. She a street that has been blocked off due to construction. She honks the horn and yells in German for the construction workers to get out of the way as she plows the four by four through the construction site.

Tony hacks logs into the Red Room network on his phone and hacks his way into Yelena's mission log. He found the status update on the nuclear sub being taken over this morning and where the Missile launch control center was located. He quickly told Nat his new information. "The launch center is isolated and off European charts. It wasn't built by Americans, but by us like two decades ago and is still operable. They took over the nuclear sub because it was closest."

Nat listened to her brother before asking some questions herself. "If they designed the launch center itself, then what is up with needing to be in Germany specifically? If Russians designed the system, how is an American nuclear sub compatible?"

"The Red Room built a launch center that targets nuclear submarines within a one hundred thousand square mile radius and takes control over it completely. Granted, they'll still have to take out the crew on board but once they do, the nuclear sub is completely off the radar from their country of origin."

Nat quickly does a recap to make sure she heard correctly. "Red Room designs a launch center to hack into nuclear submarines within a certain mile radius, and this launch center is located somewhere in Germany. Where, though?"

Tony had difficulty saying it, but he managed to pronounce "Eichheide." He put the phone down and put in the GPS directions to the isolated launch center. "Just follow wherever Siri tells you to go and we should be there in less than…" He checks the predicted time schedule, "Under an hour."

"Thanks, brother." She follows the instructions on the GPS, taking short bursts of glances down at the phone before looking up. Tony takes the phone again and types up something. "What are you doing?"

"What kind of nukes were used back then five years ago?"

Nat looks for specifics and a simple little trick to help her remember made her remember: RT-2PM2 Topol-M ICBMs. But chances are, she would be using a different set of nukes because this is a sub of American origins. The best chances are Trident II's, which are Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles." She looked down at the app on Tony's phone and saw an overhead shot of multiple cities. "What are you doing there?"

"Using technology for an estimation." Tony had searched up a nuke app and typed in all of Yelena's targets. The targets were capitals, including Shanghai, Paris, Moscow, and England. He did the math.

Beijing: 518,470

Paris: 768,300

Moscow: 376,160

London: 380,240

Tony shared his findings with his sister. "That's an estimate of at least 2,043,170." He was shocked with himself over the thought of millions of people, innocent people, dying just so the United States could be branded a pariah state. "Oh my god…"

"Over two million people," Nat held back the tears upon thinking of all the innocent children put in Yelena's crosshairs, "Two million innocent people." She pulls up to the side and puts the car into park. She looks at Tony with determination in her eyes. "There is no doubt that we have to stop her at all costs."

"Amen to that," Tony nodded, "We can't be stopping for too long because the launch sequence starts in several hours and it'll take us several hours to get to the island."

Tony puts the GPS tracker down and Nat shifts the key into place.


	7. 1

At the airfield

Instead of heading for the closest marina, the two siblings headed for the closest airport to get a small plane. Once the two arrived at a small warehouse with small airplanes inside, they ditched their vehicle and made a run for it. They were about to call for assistance until they saw the former Soviet Union symbols on the plane. The incident from five years ago came back in their minds and they targeted every Russian soldier in red camo as an enemy.

The two siblings hide behind a set of barrels and the absence of a sun replaced with a moon gave them concealment in the dark. They looked above the barrels and counted thirty soldiers, all armed and seven planes. Until one of them took off.

"Yelena and Ward already made it," Nat whispered to her brother, "I hope you've seen enough movies to know how to fly a plane."

Nat, in a crouching position, hurried over to one of the six planes still on the ground. She snuck around the soldiers and made it to the small Cessna 172 Skyhawk light aircraft. She opens the door on the side and checks the controls. She doesn't know how to fly a plane but she knows how a plane is supposed to look before aircraft. She turns around to the door and sees a Russian soldier.

He spots her and speaks in Russian. Nat holds her hands up before she kicks him in the jaw and kicks him out of the plane. She leaps out after him and she ducks her head in time to miss a punch. She punches him in the jaw before delivering one powerful blow to his nose and knocked him unconscious.

Unfortunately, he fell back and tipped over a barrel that created a very loud noise against the ground. Nat winces at the loud sound and climbs into the plane.

Tony, hearing the loud barrel drum against the ground and the startled soldiers, figures it's time to contribute. He runs and drives his body into a group of soldiers and knocks them all down. He does a front flip, his fingers grabbing a fallen assault rifle and he shoots them dead.

The alarm goes off and jeeps pull up in front of the warehouse.

Tony shot up their grills while laying flat on his back to avoid gunfire.

Nat starts up the plane and calls for her brother. Tony sprints inside the plane and heads for the controls. There was an angry Russian voice on the loudspeaker and more soldiers were rushing into the warehouse.

Tony takes control and uses his photographic memory to start the plane up and fly out, barely missing the jeeps.

The Russian soldiers in the warehouse climb into the five other planes. As Nat realizes this, she opens up the side door, takes the gun that Tony brought, and shoots at the closest plane in the propellers. The clippers went up in flames and crashed down with a nosedive and blew to smithereens.

"Find another career," she shouts. She looks down at the gun and regards the empty gun with contempt. "Damn gun." She throws it out the door and into space. She looked down and felt her heart beating from her wound. "That is a long way down." She could only assume because they were so high up in the air that she could not see. That is until Tony turned on the lights in the cockpit. "We still got four planes to deal with," she warns her brother before her brother jerked the controls forward.

The plane takes a nosedive upwards to avoid machine gunfire from an enemy plane. Nat catches herself against the railing and pulls herself back into the plane. She steps back from the door and looks for a weapon after scolding Tony for being reckless.

"Not my fault." Tony rotated the plane clockwise. "Sorry!"

Nat claws at the feet and falls against the wall, almost sliding out the still-open door. She could feel her heart in her lungs as the wind tried dragging her out of the open door.

Just a few feet above her, a crate tumbles over and nearly crushes her until she rolled out the way. The plane returned to its normal position but gunfire was still going on. The crate that almost spilled out several contents, including a grappling hook, a flare gun, a loaded RPG-7, and three rockets that came with. "More than enough to take out the planes." She grabs the RPG-7 and sticks the upper part of her body out of the window. "Keep it steady, I got a rocket launcher." She aims, waiting for a white plane to fly into his line of sight. Because it was nighttime and this rocket was guided by heat, her aim had to be precise.

AN enemy plane ascends into her line of vision and she holds her breath. She squeezes the trigger and the rocket launches out of the portable grenade launcher and hits the plane. The plane goes up in flames and falls to the earth. "Only three left." She loads another rocket and aims the Russian plane that was directly beside the plane to their right. She aims for the tail and fires, hitting the tail and blowing it off. The plane spun out of control and went flying for their plane.

"UP!" Nat shouts.

One of the wings of the falling plane hit the tail of their plane and Nat lost her footing and went falling out.

"NAT!" Tony shouts in horror.

Nat screams at first and clutches the RPG in her hand. She realizes that she is falling, but is unable to see the ground. She was falling to her doom but she couldn't see her doom. She saw Tony's plane doing a backflip to come back for her and she saw one of the last two Russian planes. With the RPG-7 in her hands, she aims without even thinking, the wind not breaking off her aim.

In an epic moment of shooting an RPG-7 while skydiving, she hits the Russian plane and turns it into dust.

Tony's plane descends below Nat's current position in the sky. He could only barely see her as she fell. He did the math and turned the autopilot on and directed it in the direction of her falling point. He runs to the back door and grabs the grappling hook. He hangs out the door and throws the end out. He uses his earpiece and calls Nat. "Nat, it's me, Tony."

"I know!" Nat shouts in irritation on the other end. "I'm falling!"

"You see the plane coming below you? That's me? Grab onto the grappling hook!"

"What grappling hook?!"

"TRUST ME!"

Nat groans and holds her hands out like she was flying. She looks up and sees the plane coming for her and she had to squint her eyes to see the silhouette outline of the grappling hook. Her brother had timed it perfectly and she flew towards the plane. She reaches her hands out and grabs for the grappling hook outline floating in the air.

Her arm is almost ripped out of its socket but she grabbed and held onto the grappling hook for dear life. Now she felt like her soul was trying to separate from her body due to the intensity of the windows trying to knock her grip off. She puts one hand in front of the other and pulls up like she was climbing up a rope...horizontally.

Tony helps his sister by pulling the rope inside but he heard the loud engines of the fourth and final plane behind them. He pulls the rope halfway in before he looked outside, his mask almost ripped from his face. Before he could do anything, a burst of light briefly illuminated the side of the plane and saw a missile coming towards them. "That's heat-seeking!" He panics at first before he feels something drop on his foot. He looks down and sees the flare gun. Without thinking, he picks it up and shoots the flare out of the plane and away. The heat-seeking missile follows the flare and diverts off course.

"Come one!" Tony pulls his sister back in and closes the door shut. They had no time to breathe before the heat-seeking missile found its way back to them. "Shit!" Tony dives for the controls and does a backflip.

Nat hits her head against the wall and floats to the ceiling. "WHAT'S THE PLAN, TONY!"

"GOT ONE!"

The light aircraft does a backflip and right over the Russian plane that fired the heat-seeking missile. The heat-seeker divers off course slightly only to seek out its new target: The Russian aircraft it was just expelled from. The heat-seeker collides with the plane and lights it up like a firework before falling towards the earth.

Nat falls to the floor with a grunt and a bleeding forehead. She feels for her wound and feels no moist texture. "You're lucky I didn't reopen my wound. What the hell kind of stunt piloting was that?"

"Saw it off a movie, of course," Tony chuckled, "You looked like you had a bit of a rough landing."

Nat gets up to her knees and walks up to Tony, resting her legs in the co-pilot seat. She puts her gloved hands against her forehead before she looks over at Tony with a calm expression. "You looked like you were trying to kill me for a split second by throwing me out this plane."

"Tempting but you're too loveable to kill."

"I'm grateful for you saving my life, but you owe me one."

"If I recall, _you_ still owe me one more dare."

Nat lets out one more breath of air before she settles in her seat and just looks out the front window. The full moon was in view and it shined a beam that illuminated several clouds up. The stars behind the moon were twinkling. Nat remembered as a little girl, she and her mother would lay on a blanket in the grass outside at night and just count the stars. They would count them until they got tired and started pretending that each twinkling star was a shooting star.

That memory brought back a smile on her face as she started singing quietly to herself: (**Airplanes is owned by B.O.B and Hayley Williams, not me**) _Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars? I could really use a wish right now, wish right now, wish right now. Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars? I could really use a wish right now, wish right now, wish right now. _

* * *

Ninety Minutes Later

"What are you thinking, Nat?" Tony asked after seeing Nat stare intensely out of the window as they soared above the clouds for over an hour. "We're only ten minutes away so if you are going to say something, then I suggest you say it now before you will forever hold your peace."

Nat thought back to five years. "Five years ago, you never gave a crap if someone was going to launch three nuclear missiles overseas and kill about a million people or so. Why do you give so much crap?" She knew it was a stupid question to ask but she just had to ask.

Tony looked at her like she _was_ stupid. "I have a family that lives in the US and I don't want them left vulnerable."

"I'm not just thinking about our family, I'm thinking about all the innocent people who are about to have their lives stolen from them."

"While you be as altruistic as you can be," Tony mocked, "I'll take care of my family."

"_Our_ family."

Tony liked the sound of that and patted Nat on the back. "Our family," he repeated before he settled back down in his seat. He looks at the GPS tracker on the console before taking back his phone and doing another math equation.

"What now?" Asked Nat?

"I'm just doing another math equation. I was wondering how we could stop the missiles in flight."

"I'm sure Yelena would've had abort codes just in case," Nat answered, "But since she took over the nuclear sub electronically, she could use some other method to stop the nukes."

"Get them to explode mid-flight?" Tony suggested, "It'll certainly work but we'll have to detonate them over the Atlantic sea. The fireball radius is about 0.93 km. In other words, about 0.58 miles. But, if you were to take into the effect of thermal radiation, then the radius is 7.73 km. To be safe, you have to be out of the blast radius and we should consider the blast radius to be 4.8 miles."

Nat understood the equation that her brother was giving. All those photographic lessons in how to learn advanced algebra worked out for him. "I'm pretty sure by the time that the Red Room took over the island, it had no inhabitants inside. So if history were to repeat itself, then it would be safer this time. There would be no civilian casualties except for Yelena, Ward, and whatever Russian soldier is on the island.

"At best, the nuclear blast will take out the entire bunch and save us the work of having to kill them all one by one. Are we going to have history repeat itself?"

"We have to make sure that no Red Room agents regain control of the launch center. Like the launch center five years ago in the Caucasus mountains, we're going to have to turn the nuke around."

"Understood." He punches in a few numbers on his phone before he turned to his sister and chuckled, "If the missile center becomes something like Chernobyl, I would not want to be there; I don't want to grow a second head." He laughs at his joke.

Nat chuckled but only slightly. "Amen to that."

Nat climbs into the back and searches the wooden crate that was spilled over earlier. She grabs the grappling hook and a spare flare for the flare gun on the floor but nothing else. She digs deeper. When she looks inside the box, she spots something at the very bottom. It was black and rectangular with a long antenna on the end. She pulls it out of the crate and examines it.

"I've got a walkie-talkie here." She reads the writing in Russian on the front. She dials a knob and listens for any incoming chatter. She switches channels until she hears…

_Dima: All units, this is Lt. Dima, anybody heard back from Marx and Chernov? Chernov was supposed to report in on the airfield like twenty minutes ago._

_Detlev: Maybe it is some kind of malfunction going on, like a bad transmitter or something. I will send a recon team back to the airfield to check it out._

_Dima: Good, because Belova and Ward are here and they will be disappointed to hear that their airfield went unchecked._

_Detlev: They're not answering, lieutenant? Please advise._

_Dima: Send a team to make sure that they are alright._

_Detlev: No problem. Volkov, Rasputin, you two got a new assignment. Check on the airfield and report back. Detlev out._

Nat didn't say anything for a few more seconds, waiting for more chatter to come on before she gave up after waiting about a minute. Tony noticed that his older sister was quiet and he turned around to question her.

"Yelena is using channel five to communicate with her allies," she said without looking at her brother. "Channel five is rarely used amongst Red Room agents."

"So, this must be an off-the-grid project or something?" Tony suggested before he moved forward and looked down at the walkie-talkie in Nat's hand. "If that is the case, then what is up with the secrecy?"

"It isn't about secrecy;" Nat answered, "Back on the plane, Yelena mentioned something about former Soviet Union army soldiers assisting her. That means that while this is not an off-the-grid project for her, it is an off-the-grid project for the Soviet soldiers helping her." She puts the walkie-talkie on the ground and smashes it under her boot with two stomps. Once the walkie-talkie was cracked, she removed the front part and took out the chip inside.

"What are you doing?" Tony became hysterical, "How are we going to listen to their communications now?!"

Once he saw her take out her cellphone and insert the chip inside, he realized what she was doing and he did not hide the impressed reaction in his voice. "I see what you're doing: You're hacking into their communications but can't you do that with the walkie-talkie. Why didn't you just take the radio?"

"This is an encrypted channel and communication network. If we were limited to just the radio, then we would only hear non-essential stuff. Yelena is smart, she would know not to keep her essential chatter on a channel that anybody could access."

"So you're hacking into their comms so you can listen to their essential and non-essential conversations."

Nat climbs back into the driver's seat of the vehicle before she hacks into the Soviet Union army's encrypted network. Despite working on a timed schedule, she can hack into their communications in less than seventeen seconds and she turns up the volume on her phone to listen to ongoing current communication.

_Ward: Repeat what you just said._

_Dima: I think we're being hacked sir._

_Ward: What do you mean?_

_Dima: One of the walkie-talkies in the planes that haven't checked in have just online. Well, now it is offline._

_Ward: What do you mean it offline?_

_Dima: Someone turned it onto channel five before turning it over. I think we might have a breach in the system._

_Ward: It's Romanoff and Masters. They are hacking into our comms. Everybody listening in on this channel, cancel all communications network, ASAP!_

"Shit."

"Shit seems like the appropriate term. We're going to be knee-deep in shit if we don't get a move on."

After eight more minutes pass, the plane finally touches down on the island on a runway that had only one plane but no soldiers were present. Tony quickly turns the plane around on the ground parks. The two quickly climb out the plane and run off the runway and into the woods, taking nothing with them so they could travel faster on foot. Using the GPS on Tony's phone, they follow a trail that leads them to the launch center.

After several more minutes, they finally made it to the end of the trail that the GPS tracker led them to and stood in between two tall trees that looked identical. The two siblings looked out to the open field ahead of them, no signs of life other than bug climbing up in the high trees. There were no houses, no lights, no evidence that there was life upon this island aside from the airfield and there were no soldiers on the airfield. Nat sighs and puts her hands on her hips as she searches for signs of a missile launch control center. "You sure this is the right place?"

"Of course it is." Tony showed her the final destination on his phone and refreshed the page and the result was the same. "It says we are standing on top of the entrance."

After Tony's mouth goes silent, something just clicked in her mind. Her eyes widen as she concludes: "We are standing on _top?_" She crouches down to her feet and starts feeling up the ground like a blind person, digging through the tall grass. After blindly reaching out, she feels something hard and metal, not natural but man-made. She feels around this metal object and feels a large and circular valve. "It _is_ under us." Nat stares down at the circular door that looked tough enough to withstand bullets and judging by the lack of dust present on the valve, it was just recently opened and closed. "This here will lead us to the command center inside and underneath."

Tony joins her and together they turn the valve and open the metal hatch. The hatch opens with a soft clink against the ground and it took the strength of both of them to lift it. They grunted and pulled it all the way open. When they are done, they look down inside and see a red ladder leading downward about twenty feet.

"This isn't the main entrance, just a backdoor." Nat gets down on the seat of her pants and inserts her feet down the hatch. Tony joins her, carefully not to step on her toes as they climb down the ladder. As he gripped the bars of the ladder, he looked above him and contemplated if he should close the hatch or leave it open. He ended up deciding not to close the hatch so that way they could make a quick escape if they needed to.

After sliding down to the bottom, Nat and Tony pressed their backs to the wall and caught their breaths.

"We made it," Nat congratulated herself and her brother, "Underground in some villainous lair." She looks ahead of her to see a junction up ahead. She moves up to the junction and contemplates which way to go. She pulls out her cell phone to listen to an encrypted conversation but there was nothing but radio silence. She looks down the path to her left then the path to her right.

"We're flying blind here," Tony points out the obvious, "We are going to need a map." Tony takes out his phone and looks into the launch center's blueprint network. He quickly sent the map to Nat's phone before they got to talking. "What's the plan, sis?"

Nat points to the command center, knowing that is where Yelena and Ward would be. "Do not underestimate these two terrorists; they managed to beat us both and they won't hold themselves back. I'll head to the launch control room."

"And what about me?"

Nat points to the power room and the path leading thereto to her left. "I'm going to need you to head to the power room." Tony questions why. "It is a lot better to work on things when your enemy is blind. Plus, if all else fails, then cutting off the power would certainly stop the nukes from launching if we can't find a new set of coordinates for the nukes to go." Tony doubts it. "Then, it would give us a good advantage to sneak up on our enemies. Either way, we cannot let Yelena or Ward leave this place alive. We either cut the power to cut off the nuclear launch, or we cut off the power to give ours the advantage of the dark."

"Understood sis," Tony didn't hesitate before he quickly ran off into the direction opposite of where Nat was running.

As the two siblings ran off in different directions, a loudspeaker came on and Yelena's voice boomed off the walls.

* * *

Yelena and Ward pull their car up to the backdoor entrance of the missile launch control center in the woods. The launch center is located underground and the hidden door was positioned between two tall trees that were practically identical. The two get down to their knees, turn the valve, and climb down inside upon closing it.

Once they hit the ground, Yelena and Ward press their backs to the wall and catch their breaths. "Did you just see that motherfucking twig turn as green as a frog?" Ward nods, confirming that she was not hallucinating when she saw Bruce Banner transform into the Hulk. "Those motherfuckers: Romanoff, Masters, we should've killed them when we had the chance. Romanoff broke my heart and now I'm going to kill her!"

Ward spoke up like he was yelling at her, "Why did you have to wait until we were already halfway across the Atlantic before revealing your plans? You should have never included them."

Yelena said to Ward, "I realize that now. I thought we were still friends, Romanoff and I. I was in love with her and she shattered my heart like glass. It doesn't matter, we just need to get back on mission." She puts her back against the wall once more and stares off down the hallway. She sighs deeply before a memory on the plane came back to her. "Good job on Masters though. I'm proud of you."

Ward smiled like a schoolboy and blushed slightly, "Thanks, anything for you."

The two of them started walking down the hallways with walls made of metal and pipes running along with the ceiling. They turn through junctions and they pass a soldier armed with a shotgun in red camouflage. Yelena recognized the soldier as Dima.

"Ma'am," Dima spoke in a firm voice, "Everything is prepped and on schedule."

"Good," Yelena replied, "The Soviet Union will be proud of you and your services."

Dima nods back, "It will be a tragedy that we will have to sacrifice Moscow but I'm sure the Soviet Union will understand."

"I promise Dima, once this is all done, the Soviet Union will rise again." Yelena had no loyalty to the Soviet Union, only the Red Room and right now, her priorities were destabilizing the superpowered country.

"If Joseph Stalin were alive, he would give you a medal," Ward spoke up. He noticed a slight shift in Dima's facial expression, knowing that the Russian soldier was not fond of him due to his German nationality. "What?"

"If you are German, then why are you helping out a Russian?"

Ward looks at Yelena for a brief second before he turned back to Dima and answered, "My loyalties are where they should be."

Yelena and Ward made it to the launch control room and saw about a dozen Russian soldiers in red camouflage spread throughout the room.

Dima leads the two up a set of stairs. When they reached the second to the last step, Dima looked down at the ground and told them to half. "There's a tripwire right there," he warned and pointed at a barely visible fishing line wrapped around the railing and spread across the stairs, ready to trip anyone who walked across with ignorance. "Be very careful."

"If you say so." Yelena and Dima step over the tripwire. Ward followed their example but he miscalculated. His foot got tangled in the fishing wire and he went falling forward like he was tripped. Man, the tripwire earned its title.

The launch control room: Filled with dozens of Russian soldiers, all former Soviet army and ready to serve Yelena. Some of them were even survivors of the incident from five years ago. Dima was the one soldier that Yelena warned about Nat and Tony infiltrating the nuclear base five years ago and he warned his teammates about them. Unfortunately, only a handful of them survived. To the soldiers, they looked at Yelena Belova with respect and even fear as she was a Black Widow agent. They were well-aware of what a Black Widow agent was and they were proud that it was a Black Widow agent who was doing the work of restoring their country to the motherland.

Yelena turns to a scientist sitting at a computer with a monitor to the nuclear sub on. "Detlev, status update."

"Meine Madame," Detlev spoke in a German accent, "Nuclear sub is currently arming up nuclear missiles. They should be active in less than twenty minutes...as on schedule."

"Any irregularities, you point them out to me directly, no missteps in this operation," she spoke with authority in her voice and made sure to let Detlev hear it before she walked away to look at the large security camera.

"Madam Belova!" a Russian soldier calls in front of her, "We have a security breach."

Detlev switches monitors on the main screen and shows footage of the hidden bunker door in the ground being opened by Nat and Tony. They climb in but don't shut the bunker door above them.

"Romanoff and Masters are back," Ward spoke under his breath but Yelena heard it. She could tell that Ward was impressed that the two siblings found them. "I can go for a rematch with Masters if you give me permission, Yelena."

Yelena heard what Ward said but paid attention to the big screen. The security footage is switched to another monitor and Nat and Tony rush off down the hallways they walked through earlier. Just when they come at the two junctions, Nat takes off to her right while Tony takes off in the opposite direction.

"Where are they going?" Yelena asked Detlev. He pulls up another security monitor on the screen and Yelena sees Nat following the path that Yelena and Ward took while Tony was heading off to the power room. Yelena's eyes narrow down at the screen like she was stalking her victims. "Romanoff is after me while Masters is running to cut the power." She grabs Ward by the shoulder and snaps off orders to him, "We have over fifty soldiers throughout the launch control center, take half with you to stop Masters."

"I can't take him down myself," Ward rebutted before he walks off and makes his way to the power room.

Yelena turns to the soldiers in the room and snaps off orders to them. "We're going to play a game of cat-and-mouse, boys." She grabs Detlev by the shoulder, "You stay here and focus on the countdown to the launch." She looks at four soldiers in the room. "The four have the opportunity to guard Detlev with your lives." She turns to the others. "The rest of you, it may seem ridiculous to give all of you the task of taking down Romanoff but she is really good so do not underestimate her. Non-lethals only, I repeat, non-lethals only. I want her to watch my grand victory."

She turns and to one of the computers with a microphone and presses the PA button to make her next speech to be public around the command center.

"Romanoff, Masters, I know you two are here and I can't wait to meet you guys. Masters is heading to the power room, if needed, assist Grant Ward with backup if required. The rest of you, take down Natasha Romanoff through NON-LETHAL force only." She pauses in her speech before pressing the button again. "I know you can hear me so believe me when I tell you this, Romanoff, you will suffer."


	8. 9

Tony rushes into the power room, remembering every route to take from the map. He always double-checks his memory to make sure that he was heading in the right direction. Once he realized that he was going in the right direction, he picked up the pace from a fast jogging pace to a sprinting pace.

T-Minus Fifteen Minutes.

He had no idea if this would work but it was either this way or the highway and highway would mean missiles launched high into the air to blow up cities. _Can't let that happen._

Tony charges through a gated door in front of him that had foreign writing written on a yellow sign. He burst through and into a power room that was about thirty square feet wide and there were at least a dozen power boxes lined up on the side of the walls by side. They all had the same warning of high voltage electrocution risk and they all had a red lever on the side. "Shit," he cursed his favorite curse word before he grabbed his head. He would've grabbed his hair but he was wearing a hood so he was grabbing the top of his head. _'Sides, I have beautiful reddish-brown hair._

"Which lever could it possibly be?"

He ran up to the closest one he could spot and pulls down the red lever and waited for the power to go out. The lights in the room still illuminate the area and Tony leaves the red lever down before grabbing the one neighboring it and trying for the same results. "These extra power boxes have to power up something, right?"

He moves along the wall, dragging his gloved fingers over the box and wondering which one to pull. They are all identical, except for the high voltage warning on the boxes, each one written in a different language. "Wait a minute," Tony said as he studied the writing. "This is a Swedish base, so the correct power box should be the one with the written in Swedish." He looks for the one with Swedish writing.

_English: High Voltage_

_Spanish: Alto voltaje_

_French: Haute tension_

_Russian: Высокое напряжение_

_Bosnian: Visokog napona_

_Polish: Wysokie napięcie_

_Italian: Alta tensione_

"Damn it," he kicks at the wall, "How many languages are there?"

"6,500."

Tony did a three-sixty turn and put his hand on his hip as if he had a gun. He knew he didn't, but Agent Grant Ward standing on the opposite corner of the room did not need to know that he didn't. "Ward," Tony hissed like viper snake, "You son of a bitch; I should've killed you when I had the chance."

"And _I_ should've killed _you_ when _I_ had the chance." Ward draws a real gun at him, aiming the barrel of the pistol right between Tony's eyes. "How easy it would be to pop a cap in between your eyes right now."

Tony raised both of his hands, but only a few inches above his waist. "Why not just do it then?" He cocks his head. "Then again, it wouldn't be a fair fight in some way."

Ward narrowed his eyes as he studied the masked man like a picture puzzle. He knew what Tony was trying to do and he smiled at the traitor. He put his pistol away in his holster before walking up to Tony before taking a fighting stance ten feet away. He held his hands up in front of his face and exhaled a breath of adrenaline. "I guess I do owe you a fair fight since I've cheated my whole life."

"I knew you'd take the bait," Tony chuckled to himself as he put his hands up and copied Ward's stance. "But I'm going to make this quick because I have to figure out which power box to turn off:

"If you say so." Ward gave a mocking shrug nonchalantly. "If you beat me, I'll tell you which power box it is."

"Alright then." Tony felt his heart pounding fast in his body. He was hyped and started bouncing off his feet. "Enough stall-"

Tony felt something slam into his side like a bulldozer and he went falling to the ground with weight on his side. He looks up and sees a Russian soldier on him. The soldier was already in the power room and he snuck up on Tony. Tony flips the soldier over so he is on top and smashes his fist into the soldier's face.

"He's mine," Ward yelled at the soldier that Tony was punching. He charges for Tony and kicks him in the face. Tony's head shook from the kick and he jumped to his feet as he fell back. He lost his balance but kicked Ward in the stomach and a good five feet away. Ward trips over the downed Russian soldier.

The Russian soldier gets up and grabs at Tony's mask. Tony slams the Russian soldier against the wall and shoves his forearm against his trachea. "Stay out of this fight." He grabs the soldier by the hair and throws him like a basket of apples down to the ground. He looks up at Ward just in the nick of time as he gets up.

The two were in a stalemate, neither one attacking the other. That is until Tony became impatient and went swinging whatever punches he knew how to throw. Ward dodged all the punches and returned some to Tony's stomach. He kicks Tony in the groin area before jumping off of the ground and kneeing Tony in the chin.

Tony rolls to the ground but gets back up less than a second later. He throws a roundhouse kick aiming for Ward's face but missed by half an inch. Tony throws three missed punches before throwing a missed kicked. He almost lost his balance when Ward tripped him but he caught himself against the wall. When he looked back, he saw a fist coming from his face. He ducks in time and the fist collides with the power box yet his enemy isn't even electrocuted.

_Not even the fake power boxes are carrying electricity._

Ward reels his bleeding fist back before throwing numerous roundhouse kicks for Tony's face. Tony jerks his head back as fast as he could and took a step back as he dodged. Every missed kick hit a power box on the wall and let out a few sparkes but Ward remained unharmed from electrocution.

Tony was about to attack him when that same feeling from a bulldozer slamming into his side suddenly came back but he was tackled by his back this time. He falls flat on his face but thrusts his hips up to shake his enemy off of him. The same Russian soldier from before still had not let up and once he was off of Tony, he pulled out a gun.

Tony's eyes looked at the gun and they went wide. He grabbed the gun before struggling to keep the barrel away from pointing at his head. He uses one hand to choke the Russian soldier while using the other to keep the gun at bay.

Ward went around Tony and kicked him in the side twice as hard as he could. Tony grunts in pain before kicking Ward in the side blindly. He took a chance with the Russian soldier and used the hand that he was using to keep the gun at bay to punch the Russian soldier hard across the jaw before tackling him to the ground. He rolls off the downed soldier but grabs his pistol and whacks him across the temple with it. With the Russian soldier knocked out, he aimed for Ward but Ward was already a step ahead and he used his gun to shoot the pistol out of Tony's hand.

"Fair fight!" Ward berates. "Remember?"

Tony's eyes are drawn to the gated door that he came through and three more soldiers came running in and charging for Tony. The younger sibling lunges for the closest soldier and wraps his arms around his waist.

Ward clapped his hands. "Thanks for the assist, boys."

Tony pushes the soldier back into the other two before snatching the pistol out of the soldier's holster and aiming it at the soldier's sternum. He pulls the trigger and the bullet shoots not only through the first soldier but through all three of them. They fell flat to the ground like mannequins and leaves Tony standing with a confused look on his face. He stares down at the gun. "A Desert Eagle gun." He cracked a smile, "Three birds with one stone."

As if on cue, Ward shot the pistol out of Tony's hand again. Tony jumps back before looking at Ward with annoyance. "If you're going to keep shooting the gun out of my hand, the next shot better kill me or paralyze me."

And for the umpteenth time, he was bulldozed by another Russian soldier once more but he didn't fall to the ground this time. He shoved the ambushing soldiers off of him and to the ground. He was about to kick him before he felt a boot connect to his saw from the side. His body goes limp and his face smacks against a power box. Much to his luck, he wasn't electrocuted.

He slid down the wall like a drop of blood before he looked up at Ward.

"The only reason you're still alive, Masters, is because Yelena ordered you and your sister to be taken down nonlethally." He put his pistol away.

"Haven't you ever heard of tasers before? What kind of Russians are you?"

Tony kicks, aiming his foot to hit Tony in the nose. Tony moves out the way and kicks Ward in the groin area. He barely budged.

"Are you wearing a cup made of iron or something?!"

Ward ignores him before swinging his foot at Tony a few more times. Tony rolls out the way before punching Ward in the groin area again but there still was no effect. _Iron cup it was then._

"Try to be original, Masters." Ward kicked Tony's stomach. The assassin blocks the kick before kipping up to his feet and is sick of being on defense before going full-on offense on Ward. He threw every attack he knew at Ward. His genetically mutated brain was using as much of his photographic reflex memory to duplicate Ward's attacks but it was as if Ward had been trained to fight himself because he was dodging every kick and punch that Tony threw and the only thing he actually could hit was the air.

Tony felt his heart pounding against his chest like it was trying to use a hammer to break out and he felt blood up to his nostrils. He was straining himself and his coordination was off. Now he was just throwing punches a two-year-old could dodge.

Tony falls to his knees and yells in pain as he feels the skin around his rib cage tightening. "Shit!" He puts a hand against his ribcage and massages it.

_Why is this happening to me? WHY?!_

Ward stood above him and kicked Tony in the ribcage. He puts his boot on Tony's shoulder as he laid on his side. "Photographic reflexes," Ward observed his fallen opponent like a vulture with his prey. "I read that you are one of a kind with your photographic reflex." He moves his foot over to Tony's temple. "There's less than one percent of people in the world who share your condition. One thing I read is that if you exercise your photographic reflexes for too long, then you'll burn out your stamina at an accelerated rate." He puts a hand on his chest dramatically, "I, on the other hand, can go on forever because I have been trained since I was a baby to be a killer." He puts pressure on his foot. "You call me a cheater when you're the one steal other people's moves."

Tony felt the foot pressing down on his temple. He groans in pain and tries pushing it off but Ward was putting too much pressure on. He could not believe what was happening to him and he started panicking, thinking of his girlfriend and daughter back home in America ...that we're about to become citizens of a pariah state ...unless...he…

Reached for the gun that the first Russian soldier dropped a few feet away from him and within arm's reach. He quickly grabs the gun and aims it up at Ward's face. He pulls the trigger without even hesitating.

The bullet enters through Ward's jaw and exits his left cheek with a hole the size of a golf ball. Ward falls off of Tony and flat on his back. Tony sits himself up and aims the pistol at Ward just in case.

Ward's head moves and he looks up at Tony with a bleeding hole in his left cheek. He extends his mouth open and moves his tongue around as if needing to make sure his mouth was still intact. "Son of a bitch," he cursed at Tony, "You're going to pay for that."

"I'm going to have to put you on hold because I already got other bills to pay." Tony pulls the trigger. Ward doesn't even flinch at the gun. He fires three more times but the result was the same: Ward still alive and no bullets hitting him.

"Shit." Tony checks the bullets inside the magazine and finds them all to be blanks. "You pulled the Blank Sinatra on me, didn't you?"

The Blank Sinatra: The first bullet in the gun is real while all other subsequent bullets are blank. Grant Ward invented the trick and he just got blanked with it.

"Great singer to pay homage to."

Ward's foot connects to Tony's jaw and he kips up to his feet. Tony rolls away before standing up and swinging the pistol to hit Ward in the temple. He misses before lunging at him to knee him in the stomach.

_How am I being bested? He is constantly on the fence while I am on offense. The only thing that I can copy down from him is his dodges._

That's when Tony's eyes light.

_Wait a minute._

Tony dodges a kick to the stomach and backflips away a few feet. He keeps himself at a distance as the two begin circling each other.

_I can copy his dodges to a T, meaning that I can throw any punch I want and I'll know what dodge he'll give. I can counterattack his dodges._

Tony rushes at Ward and throws two punches at him and misses both. He throws two more punches again before kneeing Ward in the jaw before he could even react.

_It worked. Thanks for the formula for your dodges, asshole._

Tony restarted the process of throwing misdirecting punches and surprise attacks to take out Ward. He was amazed at his success and started beating Ward up ruthlessly without any mercy shown to him.

Tony leaps up, wraps both of his knees around Ward's temple and flipped him onto his back before grabbing his arm and yanking with all his might. He lurches and hammers his fist into Ward's nose. Ward strikes Tony in the crotch before he rolls away but clumsily.

"Wait," Ward begged as soon as he saw Tony running for him.

Tony slides to the ground with the sole of his boot kicking Ward in the face. "Sorry, your mercy card expired."

He grabs Ward by the hair and picks him up forcefully. Ward yells in pain and tries punching Tony. The sibling blocks the punch with his forearm before kicking him in the waist. He trips his enemy over his foot and stomps on his chest. After that, he pulls Ward to his feet by the collars of his shirt and punched him back.

Ward falls back against the wall and he steadies himself for balance. He tasted blood in his mouth and spat hard. When he looked up, Tony was already flying through the air and landing a dropkick to his face. Ward went falling to the ground on his side.

"Mercy..."

_Merci?_ "You are welcome, Mr. Grant Ward." Tony climbed on top of him and started punching the lights out of him. "How's," he punched, "This," another punch, "For," punch, "Gratitude?!"

Tony holds up his hand one more time to punch him until he realized how bloody his enemy's face was and exhaled in exhaustion. "Go sit in the corner where you belong."

Tony steps off his opponent before heading back over to the power boxes. He searches once more for the correct one with Swedish writing. He checked every box but it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. But it was a haystack of 6,500 languages so a needle in a stack of hay numbering in 6,500.

_Yeah, that makes things sound so much easier now._

"High voltage translates as Högspänning in Swedish," he told himself, "Gotta look for Högspänning." He runs across the room to look for the correct power box and he found the power box right next to the one with the Russian writing. "There you are." He runs to the power box and pulls the red lever. He holds his breath for a few seconds and waits, but the lights remained turned on. "What the hell? What happened?" He flips the lever several more times but it was like flipping a switch.

"I don't get it; this is a German base so why the hell is this thing not working?"

He thinks back to his wife and daughter in Russian and yells in anger and punches the power box. "WHY? WHY?!"

Then something clicks in his mind and makes him realize what he missed. "This is a Russian base in Swedish." He looks off to the side and says, "This was built by Red Room agents from Russia." He clicks his tongue in impressiveness and he puts his hands on his hips and smiles. "Now that is smart." And to his luck, the Russian power box was right next to the Swedish one. "That just saved me some time." With one hand, he happily flips the lever and the lights in the room go off. It was pitch black for several seconds before he was bathed in an eerie red light coming from above him.

"Now that's what I'm talking about."

He casually strolls towards the door without the fear of tripping over something unseen as the red light lit up just enough for him to see. "Enjoy your time-out in the dark, Ward. You deserve it after all." Just as he stepped through the gated door, the hairs on his nape stiffened.

Before he could think of a possibility, the lights suddenly came back on. He squints his eyes shut after his eyes had just adjusted to the dark setting and when he looked forward, he saw the tip of an ax coming swinging towards him from the hallway.

"Oh shit!" Tony ducks.

The fire ax struck the wall behind him and a power box. This time, a live one that he missed earlier.

Sparks flew out of the power box as Tony realized that there was a backup generator and the power box that just lit on fire _was_ the backup generator. The lights flicker on and off as more sparks fly out and a fire spreads from the wall behind the power box. "See what you did?!" Tony berates the Russian soldier who threw the fire ax and knocks him out with one punch to the temple. "Non-lethals only, asshole." The red light turned back on and barely gave Tony a view ahead of him.

Tony looked forward nevertheless and saw about a dozen more soldiers about to gang up on him and they were armed to the teeth with shock sticks.

"Oh shit!"

Tony dodges the first attack before grabbing the second soldier by the throat and kicking the third soldier in the face and knocking him back. With the second soldier still in his clutches, he snatches the shock stick and tases him in the neck. He then used the shock stick as a weapon against his incoming attackers, narrowly dodging the sparks of electricity as he fought his way through the crowd.

* * *

"Nat!"

Nat looks up as she hears the familiar sound of her brother calling her name. She finishes off the enemy soldier she has in a chokehold. She snaps his neck and throws his corpse to the ground. She somersaults out of an incoming soldier's way before she lands on her knees and does a taekwondo sweep to the soldier standing in front of her. When he's on the ground, she gets on top of, shoes her hands against his throat before stopping on his knee and breaking his leg.

Tony observes his sister with intensity. He feels all of her calculated moves being written into his brain like a computer. He sighs deeply before looking over behind him to see two soldiers. He leaps forward and kicks two soldiers away with a double knee kick. He jumps into the air and does a swinging roundhouse kick across the third soldier's face. He still had a shock stick in his hand and just used it to taste his fourth enemy in the face.

The sprinklers turn on and soaked everybody in the room with water.

Nat was using slippery water to her advantage. She slides across the ground in a slick fashion and trips soldiers with her hands and feet. She leaps back to her feet and counts how many soldiers were still standing. Tony was already taking care of about ten soldiers all by himself and he had to ditch the shock stick while she still had to deal with fifteen more. She could tell by the look in their eyes that they were wary of her. She took out over a dozen men by herself like how a real Black Widow agent is supposed to.

The fire that set off the sprinklers were spreading throughout the hallway that Tony and the other soldiers came through. Nat spotted the fire in the corner of her eyes as it burned through the gated fence. She reminds herself to be cautious as she continues taking on the soldiers.

"Plenty of me for all of you," Nat shouted in arrogance at the still-standing soldiers, "No need to go one at a time."

Before she knew it, a pair of hands wrapped themselves around her back and lifted her off her feet before she had a chance to react. She headbutts the soldier and slips through his grip but her escape left her vulnerable to the soldiers' next attack.

One of them was armed with an assault rifle but instead of using the bullets, he hits Nat in the back with the butt. Nat grunts in pain and responds to this attack by kicking her foot back and hitting the soldier in the gut. She elbows the soldier she escaped from in the temple before turning around in time to grab a fist being launched at her face.

The loudspeaker turned on and sent an eerie sound through the ears of the two siblings as they stepped closer and closer to each other. "What the hell?" they spoke in unison.

"Natasha Romanoff and Tony Masters."

Nat and Tony paid half attention to Yelena monologuing while the other half focused on taking out the rest of their opponents.

"I know you can hear me and I admire the work you are putting in," Yelena said with a hint of sarcasm in her voice, "But today is a day of reckoning and there's no way in hell you can stop it. Sure, you've taken out about three-quarters of my crew but you'll still have me to deal with as well as the countdown to the launch. I have waited years for this moment and I will die before I let a couple of two-bit rogue agents ruin the chance to make the world pure again. You have seven minutes until the launch of the nuclear missiles. Good luck, Romanoff, Masters. And I expect a brawl from Romanoff shortly."

The loudspeaker went silent but neither side stopped fighting to process what was happening.

The soldiers that Nat and Tony knocked out earlier were getting back to their feet and resuming their lost battle.

The two siblings hold off each Russian soldier with all their might, usually just dodging their strikes and shoving them back into the crowd to avoid being overpowered.

Nat leaps over a wooden crate and picks it up with both hands. She gives a battle roar and slams it into a group of soldiers to break them apart.

Tony tases his opponent in the neck before running up to his next one and doing a tornado kick to his jaw. He is chased by two and he quickly does a wall-run up the closest wall and leaps off.

"Why won't these guys go down?!" Nat catches a fist and snaps the arm it belonged to it.

She feels her heart pumping and breathing becoming more shallow with each second that passed. She thought about how she had six and a half minutes left to stop the launch. Nat judged that the way Yelena was talking, Tony shutting off the power did not affect and just gave them the advantage of darkness and destroying the base.

"Go on," Tony ordered to his older sister as he held back two soldiers before bobbing their heads together, "Stop that launch!"

Nat punches a soldier across the face and stepped back a few feet to give herself room to process what her brother said. She watches her little brother hold off the soldiers before she takes a three-second glance over her shoulder to see a large metal door. She hesitates to decide on looking back at her brother and calling his name. "Let's go, Tony!"

Without even looking, he said, "Don't worry about me; I'll take care of these guys!"

Without taking another second, Nat runs through the metal door and grabs the door and starts pushing it closed. She calls out for her brother to hurry but he tells her to go on without him.

"I think he's copied enough of my moves," Nat says nonchalantly before closing the door all the way and locking it. She turns away and starts running down the hall.

When she charges down one of the halls, she breaks through a door that had a warning written in Russian. She didn't stop to think why until she saw at the very end of the enclosed hallway, was a turret mounted on a tripod and it was aiming for her. She froze in horror. "Why can't things be easy anymore?" The barrels start spinning. "Shit, motion detection."

She sprints for it, leaps onto the wall to her right with one foot before pushing off and leaping to the other with her other foot. The bullets aim a linear pattern for where she was standing on the ground and it took a whole collage of bullets before it ceased and aimed up.

Nat somersaults onto the ground and charges for the turret while it was still aiming up.

The turret ceases and aims for Nat right down the middle.

As if everything was happening in slow-mo, Nat leaps up into the air, jumping over the turret and landing on the other side onto her hands in a handstand position. She kicks the turret with her feet as she jumps to a standing position and stomps on what remains of the turret, shattering the barrels under her boots.

"And aim downwards from now on." She gets back on track.

She climbs up a flight of stairs and when she gets to the top step, something wraps around her front foot and trips her to go falling right onto a board with a single nail punctured through. The nail pierces her in her left leg and she yells in pain. She rolls on her side and looks at the board that was now nailed to her leg. She clutches her leg before howling out in agony.

"Sorry Nat, did that hurt?"


	9. 5T

After Nat separated from her brother, she follows the trail leading to the launch control room on her map. She takes a left up to the next junction and continues taking a straight path for three junctions. When she reaches the end of the hallway, there is a large steel door about seven feet tall, five feet wide with a valve acting as a doorknob. She turns the valve and pulls it open with her strength. She walks through but leaves the door open, figuring that it would be easier for a quicker escape.

She met about six soldiers on the other side of the door. _You've gotta be kidding me. _They were standing about twenty feet away from her when she stood still and glared at each of them, marking them as enemies.

"It is only one, boys," Dima said in Russian to his friends, "We can take her on."

"Do not underestimate her," a second one scolded his reckless friend, "There is a reason a number of us were sent in to take her in."

"Maybe the boss is just suffering from overkill."

Nat laughed softly with amusement, finding their Russian bickering to be cute. _These guys are the personified reason the Soviet Union collapsed._

"I'll take a stab at her first either way." Dima pulls out a knife from a hidden holster and brandishes it. He looks at Nat and charges for her.

_You REALLY gotta be kidding me._ Nat charges back at him and when they close in on each other, Nat dropkicks him in the face.

Dima's fall to the ground prompted the others to attack Nat and kill her. She kips up to her feet and runs for them. The soldier that was berating Dima was jumped on with Nat's legs wrapped around her throat and Nat sat on his shoulders and started hammering her elbow into his skull. He falls over with a tumble and the other four soldiers back away from Nat.

"Non-lethals only," Nat said, remembering what Yelena ordered them on the loudspeaker, "Wouldn't want to make your Black Widow queen disappointed, right?"

The third and fourth soldier lunged for her. Nat delivers a kick that sent the third soldier flying back like a rock and punched the fourth one in the stomach before flipping him onto his back after getting his neck in a leg hold.

The fifth and sixth soldiers were especially cautious. They had witnessed their allies fall before them and knew at the drop of a hat that they were no match for Natasha Romanoff. Fear trembled within their voices as they spoke to each other and Nat picked this up.

"You got something to say to me boys?"

The two soldiers ran off but Nat chased after them. She closes in on the fifth soldier and tackles him to the ground before doing a wall run and landing on his stomach with both knees.

The sixth soldier slapped a red button on the wall that let out a loud noise powerful enough to wake someone up from their sleep echoed from speakers overhead. The sixth soldier and Nat cover their ears as this loud ringing deafens them.

As the blaring sound slowly fades away from existence, Nat relaxed before feeling something sharp pierce her in the side...right where her unhealable wound was. Dima had stabbed her perfectly in her wound and she felt a moist texture soak against her catsuit. The blade is removed from her stomach and Nat stood with an emotionless expression on her face. Her eyes slowly drift down to her bleeding wound and she grinds her teeth. She looks up at Dima with a death glare.

Dima yells as he punches his knife at her.

Nat caught his hand, snapped it, and drove the knife into his heart. She listened to Dima give his last breath before he collapsed.

The second soldier grabs Nat. She grabbed him by the arm and snapped his arm. The soldier screams in agony and Nat snaps it one more time before letting him drop.

The third, fourth, and fifth soldiers all charge at Nat. She kicks them in their legs and their respective orders, knocking each one of them to the ground but not with enough force to render them unconscious.

The sixth soldier, who pressed the button, grabbed her in a chokehold from behind. Nat grabs his fingers in both hands and snaps them out of place. He screams and opens his hands to allow Nat to slip from his grasp like slippery water and breaks his hands even further. When she was done with him, she grabs him by the shoulder and flips him over her hips and slams him on the ground hard on his side.

The third soldier grabs Nat by the neck from her front and chokes. She flips him over her hips like she did her previous opponent and breaks his leg bone by stomping on it.

The fourth and fifth soldier attacked at the same time. She blocks both of their punches before wrapping her arms around their arms and snaps their bones in half.

The fifth soldier still managed to get up to his feet. Nat trips him with both of her feet and causes him to fall forward while she lays on her back. She holds both hands up and his throat falls into, breaking his windpipe. She flips his paralyzed body over and front flips to her feet.

As she looked and admired her work, she figured that she was done with her work for right now. She had no idea that more soldiers would come running through the steel door that she took and another steel door at the end of the room. The second round had already started and like in _Mortal Kombat, _the second round is more of a challenge than the first one.

She was surrounded on both sides by soldiers numbering in the thirties.

She is spiked on adrenaline now, clenching her fists tightly and ready to strike. She breathes heavily and she sees some soldiers doing the same, some even jumping up and down. She looks from her left then her right, looking for any soldiers that were about to make the first move and where she could run if things took a turn for the worse. "Bring it on."

The riot started. The numerous soldiers charged at her all at once, ready to pile up on her.

Nat grabs the closest soldier to her, picking him up by his hip and swinging him around like a torch. The other soldiers backed away before Nat picked the largest group of soldiers and threw the soldier at them like a boulder. The soldiers collapse and she finds her window to run and give herself a breathing room.

For the first few attacks, she was on the defense; the soldiers swing whatever melee object they possessed.

Nat fought back.

She ran backward as two soldiers ran up on her. She kicked the two in the lung areas and knocked the wind out of them. A soldier carrying a box as a weapon is smashed with her knees and he falls flat on his back. She misdirected a soldier from behind into running into the wall and knocking himself out.

Nat kicks a soldier in the stomach and folds him. She climbs up his shoulder and leaps off to elbow a soldier behind him in the head.

Nat grabs an overhead pipe within arm's reach and swings both feet at an incoming soldier. She slides under a kicking soldier's leg and kneed him in the groin. She wall-runs and jumps off with a backflip, slamming her elbow down on a running soldier's head.

She jumps over a box and narrowly avoids getting hit in the feet with a crowbar while she leaps. She kicks the crowbar thug in the jaw. She backflips and hits a soldier over the head with one foot. She does a spinning roundhouse kick to another soldier before running away to avoid getting swarmed.

She ran through the steel door but was unable to close it in time. The first soldier that came through, she shoved him back into the crowd and closed the steel door, sealing up the hatch real good. A second steel door that she did not see that stood beside the one in front of her was five feet away and it let in a hive of enemies.

A dozen enemies were coming after her at once. She looked around and spotted a small trailer with two large crates onboard. She quickly gets behind and shoved it at them, breaking up their numbers.

She dropkicks the closest soldier near her and kips up. She grabs a soldier and shoves him against the wall. She kicks another in the nut area before she was grabbed from behind. She flips him over her shoulder before finishing off the groin-hurting soldier with a knee to the jaw.

An enemy that she did not see tackled her by the waist and slammed down on the ground. She wraps her legs around his face and holds him still. A second soldier came and stomped on her chest. She grabbed his foot and twisted out of place. The one she has trapped, she kicks him away before backflipping to her legs.

"How many goddamn soldiers did you send, Yelena?" She gives a kick to a soldier's temple. "If you need this many to take me down…" She's grabbed from behind but slammed the soldier like a wrecking ball into the wall. "This is just embarrassing."

She broke another soldier's neck before she was ganged up on four soldiers who pulled at all four of her limbs. Nat struggles to free herself but one of the still-standing soldiers started punching her in the stomach.

She thought that she was finally overpowered until she was saved by a miracle. The lights went out and she used the darkness to escape from her enemies. The lights returned only for a brief second later before they went out again.

Nat and the soldiers in red were bathed in an eerie red light moments later. She had to use her sharp wits to keep up with her enemies' movement because they were swinging madly without any coordination to their attacks, most likely because they couldn't see.

All the chaos that was happening around her, she knew it could only be the work of one person: He turned off the power and by the smell of it, started a fire.

_Man, I love my little brother._

"Nat!"

Nat looks up as she hears the familiar sound of her brother calling her name. She finishes off the enemy soldier she has in a chokehold. She snaps his neck and throws his corpse to the ground. She somersaults out of an incoming soldier's way before she lands on her knees and does a taekwondo sweep to the soldier standing in front of her. When he's on the ground, she gets on top of, shoes her hands against his throat before stopping on his knee and breaking his leg.

Tony observes his sister with intensity. He feels all of her calculated moves being written into his brain like a computer. He sighs deeply before looking over behind him to see two soldiers. He leaps forward and kicks two soldiers away with a double knee kick. He jumps into the air and does a swinging roundhouse kick across the third soldier's face. He still had a shock stick in his hand and just used it to tase his fourth enemy in the face.

The sprinklers turned on and soaked everybody in the room with water.

Nat was using slippery water to her advantage. She slides across the ground in a slick fashion and trips soldiers with her hands and feet. She leaps back to her feet and counts how many soldiers were still standing. Tony was already taking care of about ten soldiers all by himself and he had to ditch the shock stick while she still had to deal with fifteen more. She could tell by the look in their eyes that they were wary of her. She took out over a dozen men by herself like how a real Black Widow agent is supposed to.

The fire that set off the sprinklers were spreading throughout the hallway that Tony and the other soldiers came through. Nat spotted the fire in the corner of her eyes as it burned through the gated fence. She reminds herself to be cautious as she continues taking on the soldiers.

"Plenty of me for all of you," Nat shouted in arrogance at the still-standing soldiers, "No need to go one at a time."

Before she knew it, a pair of hands wrapped themselves around her back and lifted her off her feet before she had a chance to react. She headbutts the soldier and slips through his grip but her escape left her vulnerable to the soldiers' next attack.

One of them was armed with an assault rifle but instead of using the bullets, he hit Nat in the back with the butt. Nat grunts in pain and responds to this attack by kicking her foot back and hitting the soldier in the gut. She elbows the soldier she escaped from in the temple before turning around in time to grab a fist being launched at her face.

The loudspeaker turned on and sent an eerie sound through the ears of the two siblings as they stepped closer and closer to each other. "What the hell?" they spoke in unison.

"Natasha Romanoff and Tony Masters."

Nat and Tony paid half attention to Yelena monologuing while the other half focused on taking out the rest of their opponents.

"I know you can hear me and I admire the work you are putting in," Yelena said with a hint of sarcasm in her voice, "But today is a day of reckoning and there's no way in hell you can stop it. Sure, you've taken out about three-quarters of my crew but you'll still have me to deal with as well as the countdown to the launch. I have waited years for this moment and I will die before I let a couple of two-bit rogue agents ruin the chance to make the world pure again. You have seven minutes until the launch of the nuclear missiles. Good luck, Romanoff, Masters. And I expect a brawl from Romanoff shortly."

The loudspeaker went silent but neither side stopped fighting to process what was happening.

The soldiers that Nat and Tony knocked out earlier were getting back to their feet and resuming their lost battle.

The two siblings hold off each Russian soldier with all their might, usually just dodging their strikes and shoving them back into the crowd to avoid being overpowered.

Nat leaps over a wooden crate and picks it up with both hands. She gives a battle roar and slams it into a group of soldiers to break them apart.

Tony tases his opponent in the neck before running up to his next one and doing a tornado kick to his jaw. He is chased by two and he quickly does a wall-run up the closest wall and leaps off.

"Why won't these guys go down?!" Nat catches a fist and snaps the arm it belonged to.

She feels her heart pumping and breathing becoming more shallow with each second that passed. She thought about how she had six and a half minutes left to stop the launch. Nat judged that the way Yelena was talking, Tony shutting off the power did not affect and just gave them the advantage of darkness and destroying the base.

"Go on," Tony ordered his older sister as he held back two soldiers before bobbing their heads together, "Stop that launch!"

Nat punches a soldier across the face and stepped back a few feet to give herself room to process what her brother said. She watches her little brother hold off the soldiers before she takes a three-second glance over her shoulder to see a large metal door. She hesitates to decide on looking back at her brother and calling his name. "Let's go, Tony!"

Without even looking, he said, "Don't worry about me; I'll take care of these guys!"

Without taking another second, Nat runs through the metal door and grabs the door and starts pushing it closed. She calls out for her brother to hurry but he tells her to go on without him.

"I think he's copied enough of my moves," Nat says nonchalantly before closing the door all the way and locking it. She turns away and starts running down the hall.

When she charges down one of the halls, she breaks through a door that had a warning written in Russian. She didn't stop to think why until she saw at the very end of the enclosed hallway, was a turret mounted on a tripod and it was aiming for her. She froze in horror. "Why can't things be easy anymore?" The barrels start spinning. "Shit, motion detection."

She sprints for it, leaps onto the wall to her right with one foot before pushing off and leaping to the other with her other foot. The bullets aim a linear pattern for where she was standing on the ground and it took a whole collage of bullets before it ceased and aimed up.

Nat somersaults onto the ground and charges for the turret while it was still aiming up.

The turret ceases and aims for Nat right down the middle.

As if everything was happening in slow-mo, Nat leaps up into the air, jumping over the turret and landing on the other side onto her hands in a handstand position. She kicks the turret with her feet as she jumps to a standing position and stomps on what remains of the turret, shattering the barrels under her boots.

"And aim downwards from now on." She gets back on track.

She climbs up a flight of stairs and when she gets to the top step, something wraps around her front foot and trips her to go falling right onto a board with a single nail punctured through. The nail pierces her in her left leg and she yells in pain. She rolls on her side and looks at the board that was now nailed to her leg. She clutches her leg before howling out in agony.

"Sorry Nat, did that hurt?"

Nat looks up from her leg to see Yelena Belova standing at the end of the hallway with a smile that sadists perfected. As quickly as possible, she rips out the nail out of her left thigh and puts pressure on her bleeding wound.

"You were supposed to be my best friend, Nat. And now," she grabs the straps on her vest with both hands, "You're making me do this.

Yelena steps forward, putting one foot in front of the other, going at a slow pace to subtly remind Natasha that she was in control. Each footstep that Yelena took gave a loud thud against the floor like she was a giant. Yelena removes her hands from her vest and pulls a pair of leather gloves out from her back pocket and fitted them onto her hands. "Let's not stand on ceremony here," she sighs." Romanoff."

"You made a serious mistake, Yelena," Nat spat at her as she pulled herself to a standing position and blocking out the pain in her thigh.

"I've made the serious mistake of not killing you when I had the chance," Yelena nodded while looking at the ground. "I've made the serious mistake of developing a crush on you. But now, I will _crush_ you."

The two walked towards each other, but Yelena's footsteps were heavy as a tank compared to Nat's light footsteps. Nat's eyes look at the gloves around her hands and she sees a blue light illuminate from the wrist area. It does not take her long to realize what kind of gloves Yelena was wearing. "You're kind of a cheater for wearing Black Widow Bites, aren't you."

Black Widow Bites: Gloves designed for close quarter combat by the red room, electrocutes their enemies and recharges in a short period.

"These?" Yelena held up her gloved hands. "These are set to the lowest setting possible because I want you to be conscious of what is about to happen next."

"I'm guessing that shutting off the power didn't stop the launch."

"Five minutes," Yelena counted in her head, "Five minutes until the launch. I want you awake so you can witness my victory."

"How do I stop it?"

They were closing in about five feet from each other. Yelena throws the first strike with both of her punches. She throws a left then a right but Nat dodges both blows. Nat throws a kick but Yelena blocks with her forearms. Nat kicks again and Yelena catches her foot and punches it with her Black Widow Bites.

Nat yelled in pain as she felt the surge of electricity spike through her like a bullet and fell to the ground. She backflips to her feet and throws a punch. Yelena catches the punch and squeezes the flesh around her knuckles, careful not to shock her. "You're willing to die to save a superpowered country?" Yelena punches Nat across the face and shocks her. "It is so much easier to die for something then it is to live for something."

"You want to live?" Nat spat out a drop of blood.

"I've earned the Black Widow title for a reason and I want to stick around to witness my after-party. That, and I want to make sure my father's wish has been fulfilled."

Nat goes for a dropkick. Yelena catches her by both feet and swings her like a sack of rocks against the wall. "I've been trained since birth. I've been trained well by the Red Room." She grabs the grounded Nat by the throat and lifts her with one hand. "The Red Room took you in, made you one of the best agents. And you stab us in the back."

"_You_ betrayed _me_," Nat chokes with the hand around her throat.

"Four minutes." Yelena roared with adrenaline as she threw Nat across the floor. She lets out a deep breath of air, her chest rising like a balloon of air and she spreads her arms like wings. "I _am_ the Black Widow. I'm the one thing you will never be, Romanoff."

Nat kicks Yelena in the groin and rolls away. She takes deep breaths while moving away from the unfazed Yelena. She moves down the hall that her enemy came through to enter a room full of computers. Out of the twenty computers available in the room, there was only one turned on and someone sat at the desk.

Detlev turned around to see Nat but she knocked him out with a kick to the face. She shoves his unconscious body out of the chair before looking at the screen. Less than three minutes and thirty seconds before launch. She turns to the keyboard and pulls up the coordinates for the launch sites. Before she could get a clear picture, Yelena ambushed her from the side and threw her over the table and knocked a few computers down.

"You never learned to mind your surroundings." The ruthless Black Widow agent picks up a computer, ripping it from its plugs and holds it high above her head and barely lets out a grunt. She throws it over the table and listens to it crushing Nat underneath.

Nat rolls out of the way in time and throws a keyboard. Yelena kicked the keyboard in the air and jumped over the table.

Three minutes remaining.

Yelena closes in on the slowly retreating Nat and goads, "There's nothing you can do from here on out." She throws a punch too fast for Nat to see coming. Nat jumped off the ground a few inches and landed on her knees whilst bent over. She clutches her stomach and feels the blood drip from her lips. She spots the heel of Yelena's shoe coming for her face and she jerks her head back.

She took half a second to spot a glowing blue baton on Yelena's hip holster and butts her in the gut with her head. She grabs the baton in the scuffle and drives the end into her abdomen.

Two minutes and thirty seconds remaining.

Yelena yells in pain and shook violently as she fell to the ground. She realized in her pained state that she had not turned down the settings for the Black Widow Batons and she paid the piper with agonizing pain that made her convulse like she was having a seizure.

Nat, remembering the mocking insult that Yelena used on her, spat it right back: "You never learned to mind your surroundings."

Without wasting any time, Nat limps over to the still-functioning computer and turns to the keyboard, dropping the baton in the process. Studying the map carefully, she presses down on a few buttons and barely has time to click enter before a Black Widow Bite glove came flying for her jaw painfully.

Two minutes remaining.

Yelena picks up the baton and turns it up to full blast and smashes it into the computer screen. "I'd like to see you try to stop the launch now." She pulls out a second baton and connects the two to make a bo staff charged with electricity. She shows off several black belts move with the bo staff before she backflips several times and lands on one foot and one knee with the bo staff held out in front of her.

_Who are you even trying to impress?_ Nat sits up and readies herself in a fighting stance. "Thank you for making my job easier."

Nat does the unthinkable: She sprints for the exit.

Yelena, when realizing that Nat was running from the fight, shouts as if she had been shot. "NO!" She throws the bo staff like a spear and hits Nat in the small of Nat's back. Nat grunts in pain and falls to the ground, losing the feeling in her legs that were replaced with electricity. She felt like her body turned to water and she was laying there on the ground like a puddle.

Yelena sprints for the steel door and closes it, locking it uptight. "Nobody leaves until one of us is dead!"

Ninety seconds remaining.

Yelena turns back to Nat and climbs on top of the wincing Nat. She reaches for her bo staff and puts the stick to Nat's neck but relaxes her grip so she doesn't choke her. "I'm going to kill you, Romanoff." By the tone in her voice, which had some hint of venom within, suggested otherwise. Either that or Yelena was slowly losing her sanity.

"Then go ahead and do it." Nat rolls her eyes at the empty threat. "Why are you taking so long to kill me?"

"Because," Yelena tensed, "I want you alive."

"Villainous stupidity." Nat laughs.

"I'm not the villain here, you are trying to save America from corruption retribution."

"Give America a second chance," Nat begged in a soft voice, "Let me show you that America is just as civilized and uncorrupt as any country."

Yelena shoved the bo staff down into Nat's windpipe with such force she felt like she was going to decapitate her. "Now you want a second chance? America doesn't deserve one!"

Once the bo staff was lifted from her throat and allowed her air to breath, she quickly asked, "What is it? What did you do that made you hate America so much?"

"America took the one thing I loved away from me!" Yelena yelled in her face. "My father was an American agent and he was left behind by the American government, the very same government that he has worked for thirty years for when Chernobyl fell apart. I held his fucking hand when he died from the radiation!"

After hearing those words, Natasha Romanoff finally understood what Yelena Belova's motives were. It wasn't out of necessity for balance, it was revenge for the government leaving her father, who worked for the American government, behind to die during the Chernboydl fallouts. A sympathetic feeling rose in her chest and she fought back to show any emotions because Yelena was showing none.

_Then again, she was the one who is threatening the lives of three million people so I feel no remorse for where I sent the actual nukes to launch._


	10. A

Thirty seconds remaining.

Nat's left hand slowly traveled down her stomach and to her waist. She moves over to her left pocket and reaches inside. She grips a square object made of cardboard. It was a box of matches that she pulled out. She flipped it open and removed a 'match' as carefully as possible.

Yelena, seeing the smile dancing on her downed enemy's face, narrows her eyes and presses the bo staff into her neck. "What are you looking so smug about?"

Nat laughed with coughs in between as she choked out her answer: "You just defeated yourself."

Yelena chuckled skeptically. "Are you getting enough oxygen to the brain? I hope so because it would be 'insufferable' of you to die of asphyxiation."

Nat holds up her hand without the 'match' inside and points blindly at the computer Yelena destroyed.

"You think I would fall for that, though? You cu-" She pauses in her speech as a memory came back. Natasha Romanoff pressed enter on the keyboard before Yelena destroyed it. Once she recollected this, she turns and looks at the destroyed monitor in horror as a dozen scenarios ran through her head and they all ended with her failing.

With Yelena's head turned, Nat thrusts her left hand up and stabs Yelena in the nape.

3...2...1...0.

Yelena screams in pain and jumps to her feet. She clutches her nape in agony before all of her movements froze in place like Yelena was a statue holding a bo staff in one hand while her other hand was grabbing her neck.

Nat spits out blood that was painted on her tongue and she slowly rises to her feet. She casually stiffens her stance and arches her back like an eagle soaring into the sky. She rotates her back clockwise and counters to crack the bones in her spine. She lumbers before she grabs her throat softly and feels for the sores. "You did a number on me, Yelena." Nat calmly walks over to the frozen Yelena and circles her. "I can't believe what kind of person you are: All this over some Daddy issues? I thought Black Widow agents were supposed to be the best of the best but you just perverted everything they stood for. You are such an embarrassment."

Nat grabs the bo staff and takes it apart so they're two batons once more. She carefully removed Yelena's Black Widow Bite gloves and put them in a holster in her utility belt. She spots her gun stolen off of her earlier and she snatches it back. "This is my favorite weapon by the way."

"What...did...you...do…" Yelena wheezes with force through her teeth.

Nat steps in front of her. The only thing that Yelena could move was her eyes and wanted herself to be the only thing Yelena could see. "I put a needle in your nape." She holds her hand up and points at the needle Yelena couldn't see. "I took inspiration from the movie_, Kiss of the Dragon_. An acupuncture needle in a forbidden location on the body. I prefer a less violent method, however." Nat demonstrates by turning around and showing Yelena her nape and tapping against the spot where she stabbed punctured Yelena. "You won't die, but I've paralyzed you. Cut off your central nervous system to everywhere in your body. The only thing mobile of yours is your eyes." Nat faces her again. "You will be free once I remove the pin from your neck."

"Please…" Yelena sobbed with a frozen face, "I... don't…"

"Want this fate? You're responsible for your downfall." Nat walks over to the destroyed computer and taps on the screen. "You think I would be this nonchalant if America was in danger?"

If Yelena could move her head and opened her mouth, she would've spat out insults and called Nat a derogatory term. But since her mouth was stitched shut, that ability was lost to her.

"All three of the missiles, instead of heading to Beijing, Paris, and Moscow, all of them are going to take a nosedive on Devon Island, the largest uninhabited island in the world. Chances of casualties there are one in one hundred billion. Trust me, I did the calculations."

Yelena's eyes widen in horror and try moving but remain paralyzed in place. She grunts out inaudible words but fails to deliver any message towards Nat.

"You brought this on yourself, Yelena," Nat says without emotion as she walks back over to Yelena, "I'm not going to kill you. I just want you to be a product of your failure." She grabs the nape of her neck and places her fingers around the acupuncture pin carefully to not rip it from her nervous system. "I'll give you a chance to escape but I promise it won't be easy: All you have to do is pull the pin from your neck and you should be free. Not too quickly or too slowly." She removes her fingers from the needle and steps back. "I would do it as quickly as possible either way because, by my calculations, you'll have at least seven minutes before the warhead comes crashing down on your roof." Nat turns and faces the door. Before she leaves, she hears Yelena call out to her in terror.

"Don't leave me!" Yelena shouted through her teeth. "Please don't leave me! Kill me!"

"Goodbye, Yelena," she said softly with sympathy in her voice, "But the main difference between you and I: I was raised to have emotions, you were trained to exterminate them. I won't kill you, but I'm not going to save you just so you can start the cycle all over again for a third time."

"Please! Kill me! Reunited me with my father!"

"You're still my friend to a degree, I can't do it. I'm sorry Yelena." She turns around and walks back to Yelena. "Just to be clear, Yelena, I'm straight and this was never going to happen between us. But I hope this makes you feel better." She laid a kiss upon Yelena's lips. She wasn't a lesbian, but she was laying a kiss upon Yelena's lips to help make her feel better. Yelena did have a crush on Nat and she decided to let her go with a parting kiss. Nat looked up on tears that broke through Yelena's eyelids. She finally had something to cry over other than dying. Her wish had come true.

"See you later, I'll remember you as my best friend and not a killer." Nat steps out of the room, leaving Yelena to sob quietly. She thought back to the kiss though. She knew Nat wasn't gay and that it was never going to work between them, but she was happy that the woman of her dreams had made her wish come true.

Nat runs down the hall, reaching the stairs. Before she made it to the stairs, she tripped on something and went tumbling down once more. She yelled in pain when she reached the bottom step and landed on her back hard. She had completely forgotten about the tripwire that was set up earlier. The same tripwire that caused her to fall and nail her thigh to a wooden board. The pain in her thigh returns but she suppresses her cries of agony by forcing her mouth shut. "Not this time," she told herself with a wheezing breath. "I'm not screaming in pain this time."

* * *

Tony finished off the last of the thugs and staggered backward and pressed his back against the wall. That big fight with over fifty men had taken a toll on him and cost him most of his physical energy. He slowly slides down the fall and lets the soaking water from the sprinklers that were _still_ running soak up the sweat around his neck area. He removed his skull mask and allowed his real face to get a breath of fresh air. He opens his mouth and lets the water sprinkle into his mouth and he gulped it down.

"Tony!" Nat's voice called him in the corner. He lifts himself off his feet and waddles over to the steel door and unlocks it. He pulled the door open with all his strength and Nat comes running through. "We have to get out of here as quickly as possible."

"What the hell did you do this time, Nat?" Tony asked but didn't follow her. She stopped in the middle of the room full of corpses and unconscious bodies.

She holds her hands up in confusion but when she felt the sprinkling water hit her forehead, she felt as cool as a cucumber. After thirty minutes of physically fighting, she felt like she deserved a break...until she reminded herself why she was running in the first place. "There's a warhead coming our way, have to get out of here."

"What did you do?" Tony demanded as he jumped over the bodies to meet his sister. He spots her limping on her right leg and saw the blood trickling down her side. "What the hell happened to your leg?"

"Pure accident. Must get out of here unless you want to be radioactive fish food." Nat limps to another steel door at the end of the hallway and with the assistance of Tony, unlocked it and started limping as quickly as possible. She finds the strength within herself to mentally block out the excruciating pain in her thigh and just runs as fast as she could, jumping over bodies in the process.

One of the bodies sprung back to life and grabbed Nat as she jumped over him.

Nat fell to the ground and immediately kicked the threat in the face and back into consciousness. "Stay unconscious!"

Tony grabbed her by the hand and helped her up. He ran in front of her and acted as an escort. He made sure that none of the bodies would spring back to life and try to pull a lurker on them from _The Walking Dead._

Tony leads Nat to the junction from earlier where they split up. There was still a fire raging throughout the hallways but it was under control and not spreading as much as it was earlier. "Looks like God is giving us a chance."

Nat and Tony make it to the ladder. Tony climbs up first to make sure that the top was clear of any threats. Nat climbed one leg up at a time up the ladder but when she made it halfway up, the bar she had her hand wrapped around dislodged from the ladder and sent Nat falling.

Upon the surface, several soldiers escaped the launch control center after hearing the countdown of the nukes being launched. They were either aware of the nukes' new targets, or they were running out of fear of Nat and Tony. Several of the soldiers ran back to the airfield and climbed into the airplane that Yelena took to get on the island earlier. The seven of them quickly climb in. Four soldiers that were left behind, spotted Tony climbing out of the hatch and went to settle the score before leaving.

Tony, using his photographic memory on how fast Ward was, quickly snaps the first soldier's neck and shoves his body towards the three. He lunges for the three as they push the body away and drives all three of them into the ground with a single tackle.

With Nat in the underground tunnels, the fires were started to spread in her direction. She spotted the incoming threat and started climbing as fast as she could up the ladder. She makes it above the hallway point but the bars that her feet were standing on broke beneath her. She loses her balance and her hands slip from the bars. She falls as flat as a piece of paper on her back and groans in pain. Her unhealable wound was starting to hurt again.

The fires got closer.

"Why does everything have to be so difficult? Am I in a movie or something?"

She races up the steps but the lower part of the ladder broke off from the top part under her weight. She held the broken off part of the ladder in her hands before throwing it down to the ground in fury. "I thought it was bad luck standing under a ladder."

The fires come closer and closer to her. She presses her back against the space in the wall where the ladder should've been. She reaches for the tip part of the ladder but it was out of her reach by five feet. "Shit," she cursed her favorite phrase, "Looks like I'm going to have to do this old-fashioned way."

Nat runs down the hall right down the middle, narrowly avoiding the flames that are starting to climb up the wall. The sprinklers do little to nothing to keep the fires under control. She positions herself and takes deep breaths of adrenaline. She sprints for the wall, running as fast as she could, feeling her heart pulsing through the wound in her thigh and what felt like something falling out of her unhealable wound. She leaps off the ground and wall-runs up and grabs the ladder with one hand.

She pulls herself up and prays that the bars won't disconnect from the walls this time.

Unknown to her, the sleeve to her right leg caught fire and slowly spread up her catsuit.

On the surface, there were corpses of the first, second, and third soldier lying on the ground in front of Tony.

The fourth thug raises his gun and prepares to shoot Tony in the back.

Nat leaps forward and kicks the soldier in his spine. The soldier falls to the ground with a thud and quickly picks himself up and aims the gun at Nat. Nat does a tornado kick to the thug and hits him square in the neck with the pant sleeve that was set on fire. The soldier drops to the ground unconscious and Nat quickly pats down on her pants to put out the fire.

Tony kicked dirt and the fires eventually went out but not before they left first degree burns on her right ankle and thigh.

"That was awesome," Tony commended, "That was awesome."

"Thanks," Nat replied in a nonchalant voice before the two hustle back to their airplane, Tony once again taking control.

"I estimate that we got a few more minutes before the bomb touches down here," Nat warns her brother, "I think I might have done a miscalculation."

"I don't care, I'm just flying off."

Tony turns on the engines. The Russian airplane in front of them that was filled with the soldiers saw Nat and Tony get into the light aircraft but none of them made any attempts to attack. It looks like they were aware of the new nuke's launch coordinates. Both planes speed up down the runway, picking up speed as each second passed. At the same time, both planes pull up the throttles and ascend into the air but Nat and Tony's plane was ahead.

"Do you remember what the blast radius was, Tony?"

Tony's memory started acting up due to absorbing all the fighting moves. He stutters, "Five or six miles, I don't remember."

"Just fly us as quickly as you possibly can out of her.

If Tony could hammer his feet onto the imaginary and fly faster, then he would.

Nat looks out one of the windows and although it was still dark outside, she could see the island gets smaller and smaller the more distance they put between themselves and the island. "We want to get far enough to where we can't see the island."

"Do you want to take the plane?"

"No, you got this little brother. You seem to have a better hand on it then I do."

"Then stop pestering me and let me do my job!"

"Alright, I'm sorry. I just don't want history to repeat itself."

Tony yells: "HISTORY, REPEAT ITSELF!" He looked over his shoulder at his sister. "History is already repeating itself. Except for this time," Tony replays the incidence back in his mind and compares it to today, "We get a chance to escape with our appendix and face still intact. How could that slut do that to us? Just to restore balance? I like the world the way it is right now."

"Personal reasons."

"Insane daddy issues can make anybody go crazy nowadays." Tony was about to say something else until he felt a rumble and his attention was now at its peak. "What the holy shit?" The two siblings looked up and saw what looked like a meteor that was lighting up a small section of the sky like the sun. The two shielded their eyes from the bright sun and turned away. Tony turned on the autopilot and placed his goggles on before he looked out one of the windows to see the nuke blowing up the island and leaving a gray mushroom cloud behind. "Wow," he gasps in astonishment. The explosion was big and bright enough to light up several miles as if it were the sun. "That is…" He had never seen a nuke go off in front of his eyes. "Something else."

"And this time, we get a second chance to rectify our hesitation." Nat opens one eye to look out and watch the gray mushroom cloud rise in the sky. She takes in a breath before letting it out. "Goodbye, Yelena."

* * *

Five Days Later

Almost a week had passed since the incident in Sweden. The touchdown site received no casualties from the civilian side but when NATO sent their NEST teams to investigate, it was estimated that there were ninety-four casualties in the launch control center and all these casualties were Russian soldiers. There were a handful of people that survived, either by escaping the island or by winning the astronomical chances of surviving and one of those people was Yelena Belova. She survived but ever since the United Nations branded her as a code red security threat to not only the United States but the world, she was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole to the most secure supermax prison in the world: ADX Florence. While she lived the rest of her days rotting in prison, she was also going to spend the rest of her dies, rotting away with radiation poisoning. Just like her father. While she stayed in a cell, chained to the wall like a dog, less than seven days to live, she would always look back at that kiss that Nat delivered upon her lips, and smiled. It was just enough reason for her to want to be alive, so she could always replay that memory out in her head.

Nat and Tony were in the hospital for a checkup to make sure that neither of them had any major bodily damage. After the 'Nuclear Disaster Backfire of Sweden' as the locals called it, Nat and Tony were taken in by soldiers in NBC suits and were given a scrub down for any radiation. How humiliating it was for them but at the end of the day, Tony get to keep his skull mask.

Now the two Red Room agents laid back in their neighboring hospital beds back home in Washington D.C. Tony insisted that he keep his mask on during all times of his stay at the hospital for obvious reasons. Nat was lying comfortably on the bed and snuggling up against her pillow and drifted off to sleep during the daytime.

"Aunty Natty!"

Nat woke up with a groggy vision, not knowing what time of day it was before a heavy object weighing around forty pounds came jumping on her stomach and she let out a groan of discomfort. "That's a big hug there," she said to her smiling niece, "Jeanne."

"How are you feeling, Aunty Natty?" Jeanne asked excitedly, "Mommy told me that you have a few broken bones."

_You would think so with the cast wrapped around the one leg that received a lot of damage._ "They're battle scars, Jeanne." _Especially the battle scar that I've had for five years and the doctors are STILL unable to fix._ "These battle scars tell a story."

"Can you tell me a story?"

Nat looked at her bandaged face brother for approval and he gave her the okay. Nat then started telling the kid version of what happened to them.

Mercedes Merced-Masters approached her husband and watched with glee as Nat started chatting with her daughter. It brought a warm smile to Tony's face to see his daughter happy and he grabbed Mercedes's hand and kissed it. "I must be in Heaven if I'm seeing such a beautiful face."

Mercedes blushed at her husband's flirting. "Every day can be Heaven for you, babe." She regards the bandages wrapped around his face. "Speaking of beautiful faces, is wrapping your face in bandages like a mummy necessary?"

Tony shrugged innocently. "I would've been wearing my skull mask but doctors told me that if I'm going to refuse to show my disfigured face, then I should at least be wearing bandages so there is no confusion."

"If that's how you want it then I guess it's okay."

Mercedes grabs a nearby chair and sits down in it. She rests her elbows on her knees with her head hanging down. She thinks back to something before she looks up at her husband and sighs. "You remember when we first met?"

Tony looks at her and it doesn't take long before the memory comes back to him like his brain was playing a sideshow. "We met as trainees for the SWAT force," he said as he sat up. "I remember." More of the memory starts to play out. He was grateful he didn't lose any of his core memories with his wife as he continued like a narrator: "You were best friends with Derek Killian."

"He introduced us," she corrected like an editor.

"You turned me down twice before you finally agreed to double date with Derek and his civilian girlfriend."

"You were a conceited douchebag back then," she recalls, "You were so conceited it made me sick."

"I wanted the best so I could be the best." _Looks like that's another thing my sister and I have in common. _"That's why I couldn't stop thinking about you."

"I was starting to worry about you not remembering."

Tony knew why. "That's why I've always tried to stay away from fights as much as possible: So my memories of you and Jeanne weren't erased. I remembered on our wedding night that we danced to the song 'Heroes and Villains' by the Beach Boys. I always remember because whenever I'm in a bar, or fast-food joint, or wherever with a jukebox, I would play it for hours and hours and hours just so I could gain the memories back. I remember one time playing the jukebox the same song for three hours. I think I even annoyed the waitress working there. It is memories like this that make me never want to get into fights because you and Jeanne are the most precious thing in the world to me."

She eyes Nat. "What about Nat?"

He contemplated with a so-so gesture of his hand, "She's okay for a sister, so she is the second most precious thing I'd say."

Mercedes chuckled before she leaned over and kissed her husband on the bandaged forehead. "Thanks for doing what you did."

"No problem. I've always wanted to be a superhero until I realized that they were fictional. So I just try to be the best there is for you and Jeanne."

"You're a superhero to me and that's what our daughter thinks over there."

The two watch Nat and Jeanne exchange conversations.

"And just like that, the Wicked Witch of the East went flying right into the sky and falling right after the meteor hit the ground. And after that, the Wicked Witch of the East was banished to a dungeon and never heard from again. That's when Nat clicked her ruby slippers together and she and her dog, Tony, escaped back home to see little Jeanne."

"Wow," Jeanne gasped in awe after hearing the Wizard of Oz version of the story, "That was a great story, Aunty Natty. Are there any other stories that you can tell me?"

"Not right now I'm afraid." She sets her niece down before sinking back into her bed. Her eyes drew up to the television and they see a news report on somebody. She thought the person looked familiar before she recognized that handsome face. "Bruce Banner?"

"Who's Bruce Banner, Aunty Natty?" inquired Jeanne.

Nat brought herself out of her trance and shrugged. "I have no idea, honestly." It wasn't a total lie. _I do know that he turns into a green creature and that he terrifies me in that state._

"What you thinking, Nat?" Tony questioned like he was an interrogator. His eyes followed to the screen. "Who's Bruce Banner?"

Nat looked at him like he said something she didn't like. She opened her mouth to scold him but decided not to. "Just somebody."

"If you say so," he said doubtfully.

Nat sits up in bed and stretches. She grabs a crutch and walks herself out of the room. Tony gets out of bed and chases after her, telling Mercedes and Jeanne to eat whatever hospital food they gave him.

"Where are you going?"

Nat slows to a stop and faces her brother. "I was just getting some fresh air."

"You should get back to bed. After all, you deserve a good night's rest. You saved the world from nuclear warfare."

"I was just doing what anybody would've done."

Tony shook his head. "Don't try and act all modest with me: You're the superhero that I've always wanted to be. You should be proud of yourself. Jeanne is proud of you and she is four."

"I can't rest yet," she insisted, "THe Red Room excommunicated the two of us because they knew what we were capable of. That means they're scared of us."

"Then can't we just leave them alone?"

"Leave the Red Room alone?" She shook her head. "It's too powerful of an organization to exist. If someone like Yelena could become a Black Widow agent, then I have to do something about the Black Widow mantle. With Yelena about to die in a few days, someone will be eager to take her place and probably someone worse than her."

"Let me come with you. I mean, we are in this together like Batman and Robin. I'm Batman and you're Robin."

Nat laughed under her breath but shook her head. "I've wanted to become a Black Widow for the longest time but now I realize what kind of rank and level of authority that title holds, it is too powerful. If the whole point of a Black Widow was supposed to be an idea and not someone with superhuman abilities, then anybody could be a Black Widow. And I have a theory that Yelena and Ward became a Black Widow and Hourglass was because they both were born and raised in the Red Room."

"Your reasoning is sound, Nat, but how are you going to eliminate the Black Widow mantle if it is just an identity that anybody could assume?"

Nat went silent as an answer came to mind. "I'll take up the Black Widow title myself. I'll take it up and do what Yelena and Ward failed to do. I'm not going to become vindictive people like they were."

Tony's eyes widened through the eye holes in his bandages. "You're going to take up the Black Widow mantle?" He raises his hand like a toddler. "Can I be the Hourglass? Please?"

She nods.

"So if you're going to become a Black Widow, what is the message that you're going to be sending? You can't just take up the Black Widow mantle and call yourself a badass. You have to have some kind of angle."

"The message I intend to spread is that the world isn't so black and white. The two of us are living proof that there are good people in the world."

"Calling ourselves good people seems self-proclaimed."

"We were called good people by your wife and daughter. I feel like that's enough to motivate you."

Tony laughed and patted his sister on the shoulder. "Good luck, sis. You sure are going to change the world one day." He pats her in the stomach and unintentionally opens up her wound once more.

Nat smiles in annoyance at him and casts him an annoyed look. "Thanks for the pat on the stomach, Taskmaster."

* * *

_Secret Ending_

_About a year passes before Nat picks up Bruce Banner's trail. They track him down to a hospital in Turkey and they subdue two mercenaries known as the Gradys and she assumes the female's identity via a holographic mask while her brother assumes the male's identity with his latest mask with an updated hologram system. They slowly stepped into the hospital room with the human Banner to observe until he turned around and threw a crowbar at Nat's stomach._

_The crowbar struck the female Grady sister in the chest and she went flying back. The male Grady brother's eyes followed his sister as she flew across the room before turning back to shoot Bruce with his pistol. Bruce rushes the Grady brother and slapped the pistol out of his hand before grabbing him by his neck and slamming his head into the door jamb above him and knocked the brother out instantly._

_Nat hid behind a couch and focused on breathing, trying not to give her position away and when she heard the sounds of growling coming from the human Bruce, she stiffens in fear._

* * *

**Hello readers, The Alpha Gray Wolf here, I have just finished the latest introductory to my Marvel Fanfiction Universe stories. That does it with Phase One of the Marvel stories and now time for Phase two. I have a storyline planned out and if you want to read my Phase One stories in order, it's Black Widow, Incredible Hulk, Spiderman, then Venom. And if you pay close attention, you'll find small details that show that all these characters are connected and everything is set up like a domino effect. Thank you for reading my story and I really appreciate it. Leave a review, favorite it, follow it, and as always: Constructive criticism is always helpful. I'm multitasking with my fanfiction stories and I hope you like the outcomes. Thank and until next time, I'm the Alpha Gray Wolf.**

**Oh, and by the way, all of this stuff in the story is original. Nothing was taken from the Black Widow trailer as this was halfway down when the trailer came out. And the chapter titles spell out**

**BW52TM195TA**

**This serves as two things: The abort codes to the nukes from five years ago and the first appearances of Black Widow and Taskmaster in the Marvel Comics.**

**Black Widow: Tales of Suspense #52 and Taskmaster: The Avengers #195**

**Goodbye and Merry Christmas.**


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